Design and Implementation of Software-Based MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 encoder on Multi-Core Processors
Date Issued
2006
Date
2006
Author(s)
Lin, Sheng-Kai
DOI
en-US
Abstract
The latest video coding standard, MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, achieves better coding performance than prior codec. As compared to MPEG-4, H.263, and MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 saves about 37%, 48%, and 64% bit rate, respectively. However, the better performance is contributed by advanced coding tools which result in higher computation complexity. And the higher complexity limits the application scenarios. According to the time profiling analysis, temporal domain prediction takes about 75% execution time on HD resolution videos. Therefore, our work accelerates the temporal prediction via several efficient algorithms without serious side effects. First, we propose a fast algorithm for multiple reference frames based on correlations between temporal adjacent frames. In addition, several simplification methods for block-matching, variable block size motion search, and fractional pixel search are studied and implemented to reduce the required computation load. While those algorithms are applied, the temporal prediction requires only 38% of the computation load. Besides, as compared to the H.264/AVC reference software, our encoder achieves about 12X speed up without inducing serious quality degradation and compression ratio drop.
Nowadays, the multi-core processor architecture becomes more and more popular and is widely adopted in many areas. In the embedded systems, asymmetry multi-core processors are applied to complete tasks with different attributes while symmetry multi-core processors are considered the next generation of CPU on personal computers (PCs). However, the common H.264 encoders are single-threaded and can not take the advantage of multi-core processors and therefore, several parallel schemes have been proposed. The traditional methods aim to manipulate multiple data sets, such as slices, in parallel but are only applicable on symmetry architectures. In our work, we exploit the dependency relationship between coding tools and design a function parallel scheme for asymmetry architectures. Furthermore, we utilize a wave-front macroblock encoding order to avoid the inter-dependency between data sets and propose a hybrid parallel scheme applicable for both symmetry and asymmetry architectures. With the proposed schemes, the encoding process is further accelerated.
Subjects
視訊
編碼器
多重參考畫面
多核心
移動估測
MPEG-4 AVC
H.264
encoder
multi-core
dual-core
multiple reference frame
motion estimation
asymmetry processor
Type
thesis
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