Parallel HEVC Decoding on Multi- and Many-core Architectures

Abstract

The Joint Collaborative Team on Video Decoding is developing a new standard named High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) that aims at reducing the bitrate of H.264/AVC by another 50%. In order to fulfill the computational demands of the new standard, in particular for high resolutions and at low power budgets, exploiting parallelism is no longer an option but a requirement. Therefore, HEVC includes several coding tools that allows to divide each picture into several partitions that can be processed in parallel, without degrading the quality nor the bitrate. In this paper we adapt one of these approaches, the Wavefront Parallel Processing (WPP) coding, and show how it can be implemented on multi-and many-core processors. Our approach, named Overlapped Wavefront (OWF), processes several partitions as well as several pictures in parallel. This has the advantage that the amount of (thread-level) parallelism stays constant during execution. In addition, performance and power results are provided for three platforms: a server Intel CPU with 8 cores, a laptop Intel CPU with 4 cores, and a TILE-Gx36 with 36 cores from Tilera. The results show that our parallel HEVC decoder is capable of achieving an

A New profiling and pipelining approach for HEVC Decoder on ZedBoard Platform

“…The proposed method of MV-HEVC showed improvement in terms of processing speed on advanced RISC multi-core processors mobile platforms (ARM). In [17], Authors used the Wavefront Parallel Processing (WPP) coding and implemented it on multi-and many-core processors. The implemented approach is named Overlapped Wavefront (OWF), an extension of WPP tool that allows processing multiple picture partitions as well as multiple pictures in parallel with minimal compression losses.…”

“…Stage 3: Filtering, which corresponds to transitions (15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26). This stage corresponds to the Loop Filter process A parametric analysis of the application has enabled to deduce that the overall execution time of Stages 0, 1 and 3 is approximately equivalent to the execution time of Stage 2.…”

Frame-Based and Subpicture-Based Parallelization Approaches of the HEVC Video Encoder

“…Many of the parallelization research efforts have been conducted on the HEVC decoding side. In [7], the authors present a variation of Wavefront Parallel Processing (WPP), called Overlapped Wavefront (OWF), for the HEVC decoder, where the decoding of consecutive pictures is overlapped. In [8], the authors combine tiles, WPP, and SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) instructions to develop an HEVC decoder which is able to run in real time.…”

HEVC performance and complexity for 4K video

“…First approaches to enable real-time decoding of HEVC coded 4K video sequences have been analyzed and presented in [7], [8], [9], and [10]. In these studies, the HEVC test model (HM) reference software decoder code was optimized and modified to support multithreading.…”

“…A slightly modified version of WPP, called Overlapped Wavefront (OWF) and Tiles have been studied in [8] and [9] based on HM 4.1. The most recent publication shows results for OWF based on HM 8.0 and further reports speedup due to the use of Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) code optimizations [10]. The 4K (3840×2160) sequences used in these publications are from the Sveriges Television (SVT) High Definition Multi Format Test Set.…”