Video Analysis and Compression on the STI Cell Broadband Engine Processor

Abstract

With increased concern for physical security, video surveillance is becoming an important business area. Similar camera-based system can also be used in such diverse applications as retail-store shopper motion analysis and casino behavioral policy monitoring. There are two aspects of video surveillance that require significant computing power: image analysis for detecting objects, and video compression for digital storage. The new STI CELL Broadband Engine (CBE) processor is an appealing platform for such applications because it incorporates 8 separate high-speed processing cores with an aggregate performance of 256Gflops. Moreover, this chip is the heart of the new Sony Playstation 3 and can be expected to be relatively inexpensive due to the high volume of production. In this paper we show how object detection and compression can be implemented on the CBE, discuss the difficulties encountered in porting the code, and provide performance results demonstrating significant speed-up.

Selecting Spatiotemporal Patterns for Development of Parallel Applications

“…For example, applying the decision tree to the process executing the search strategy, we find that the dependences of this individual function are much easier to analyze and the decision tree recommends spatial data partitioning to improve the latency of this function. (For a more detailed discussion of using SIP and SDP together in the camera, see [7]. )…”

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Towards efficient video compression using scalable vector graphics on the Cell/B.E.

“…architecture [1,10]. Similar approaches to image processing application on the hybrid multi-core systems are described in [9,11,14]. In [4] the implementation of a MPEG-2 decoder using the StreamIt programming language is described aiming to improve programmer productivity, while concomitantly exposing the inherent parallelism and communication topology of the application.…”