A Hybrid Method on Video Mixing for Multimedia Videoconference

In this paper, we propose a fast video mixing method for reducing the computational complexity in the MCU (Multipoint Control Unit) used in the video conferencing. The conventional mixing method is based on the pixeldomain transcoder, of which computational complexity is linearly increased as the number of participants is increased. Basically the method requires N decoders and one huge encoder to mix the bitstreams from the N participants. To reduce the computational complexity, we propose a hybrid mixing method based on the bitstreamdomain and pixel-domain transcoding methods. The proposed method reduces the computational complexity about 45% at the improved quality, compared with the conventional mixing method based on the pixel-domain transcoders.