Dynamic Data Partition Algorithm for a Parallel H.264 Encoder

Authors: Juntae Kim, Jaeyoung Park, Kyoungkun Lee, Jong Tae Kim

Abstract:

The H.264/AVC standard is a highly efficient video codec providing high-quality videos at low bit-rates. As employing advanced techniques, the computational complexity has been increased. The complexity brings about the major problem in the implementation of a real-time encoder and decoder. Parallelism is the one of approaches which can be implemented by multi-core system. We analyze macroblock-level parallelism which ensures the same bit rate with high concurrency of processors. In order to reduce the encoding time, dynamic data partition based on macroblock region is proposed. The data partition has the advantages in load balancing and data communication overhead. Using the data partition, the encoder obtains more than 3.59x speed-up on a four-processor system. This work can be applied to other multimedia processing applications.

Keywords: H.264/AVC, video coding, thread-level parallelism, OpenMP, multimedia

Digital Object Identifier (DOI): doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1056711

References:

[1] C. Luo, J. Sun, and Z. Tao, "The research of H.264/AVC video encoding parallel algorithm," 2nd IEEE International Symposium on Information Technology Application, 2008.
[2] Y. W. Huang, T. C. Chen, C. H. Tsai, C. Y. Chen, T. W. Chen, C. S. Chen, C. F. Shen, S. Y. Ma, T. C. Wang, B. Y. Hsieh, H. C. Fang, and L. G. Chen, "A 1.3tops H.264/AVC single-chip encoder for HDTV applications," IEEE Int.Conf.Solid-State Circuits, Feb 2005, pp. 128-130.
[3] S. M. Akramulah, I. Ahmad, and M. L. Liou, "Parallelization of mpeg-2 video encoder for parallel and distributed computing systems," in Proceedings of the 38th Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems, Aug 1995, vol. 2, pp. 834-837.
[4] P. Tiwari and E. Viscito, "A parallel mpeg-2 video encoder with look-ahead rate control," in Int. Conf. Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, May 1996, vol. 4, pp.1994-1997.
[5] N. H. C.Yung and K. K. Leung, "Spatial and temporal data parallelization of the h.261 video coding algorithm," IEEE Trans. Circuit Syst. Video Technol., vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 91-104, Jan. 2001.
[6] Z. Zhao, P. Liang, "A highly efficient parallel algorithm for H.264 video encoder," 31st IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2006.
[7] S. Sun, D. Wang, and S. Chen, "A highly efficient parallel algorithm for H.264 encoder based on macro-block region partition," HPCC 2007, LNCS 4782, pp. 577-585, 2007.
[8] Y. Chen, E. Q. Li, X. Zhou, and S. Ge, "Implementation of H.264 encoder and decoder on personal computers," Journal of Visual Communications and Image Representation, 17, 509-532.
[9] JM11.0, http://iphome.hhi.de/suehring/tml/download/old_jm/jm11.0.zip