Improving transient memory fault resilience of an H.264 decoder

Abstract

Traditionally, fault-tolerance has been the domain of expensive, hard real-time critical systems. However, the rates of transient faults occurring in semiconductor devices will increase significantly due to shrinking structure sizes and reduced operating voltages. Thus, even consumer-grade embedded applications with soft real-time requirements, like audio and video players, will require error detection and correction methods to ensure reliable everyday operation.Cost, timing and energy considerations, however, prevent the embedded system developer from correcting every single error. In many situations, however, it will not be required to create a totally error-free system. In such a system, only perceptible errors will have to be corrected. To distinguish between perceptible and non-perceptible errors, a classification of errors according to their relevance to the application is required. When real-time conditions have to be observed, the current timing properties of the system will provide additional contextual information.In this paper, we present a structure for an error-correcting embedded system based on a real-time aware classification. Using a cross-layer approach utilizing application annotations of error classifications as well as information available inside the operating system, the error correction overhead can be significantly reduced. This is shown in a first evaluation by analyzing the achievable improvements in an H.264 video decoder under error injection and simulated error correction.

Soft Error Handling for Embedded Systems using Compiler-OS Interaction

“…To assess the impact on the QoS, we developed the quality assessment tool shown in Fig. 6 [8]. It receives video frames decoded by the target ARM system under the influence of errors using FEHLER's flexible error correction and compares these frames to the correctly decoded reference frames (indicated by the yellow and red squares in the lower left pictures-the more red, the larger the difference between the two frames is).…”

Mitigating Silent Data Corruptions in Integer Matrix Products: Toward Reliable Multimedia Computing on Unreliable Hardware

“…which, similar to ABFT, can be derived during the input subblock reordering. Then, after checking for SDCs based on the post-entanglement check (and recalculating all detected SDCs), we can check if r rc produced by (24) agrees with the sum of all the elements of R:…”

“…It may be argued that, because multimedia applications are inherently error tolerant [7], SDCs would always have a benign effect on the output results. However, recent studies [24], [38], [44] show that there exist "critical" sections of multimedia applications where mitigation of soft errors is imperative, especially when outputs from such sections are reused for subsequent computations. In view of this, in the next two subsections we present such an example within the context of state-of-the-art image and video retrieval algorithms and we also showcase the corresponding energy…”

Improving the fault resilience of an H.264 decoder using static analysis methods

“…This article is an extension of the work previously published in Heinig et al [2010]. While in the previous publication the H.264 video decoder has been analyzed only manually, in the current article, we present a static analysis for the creation of an error classification.…”