ATTENTION: This is a web archive! The IMS Group was split up in 2018 and does not exist anymore. Recent work of former members can be found at the VR/AR Group and the Computer Vision Group.

Interactive Media Systems, TU Wien

Evaluation of data-parallel H.264 decoding approaches for strongly resource-restricted architectures

By Florian Seitner, Michael Bleyer, Margrit Gelautz, and Ralf Beuschel

Abstract

Decoding of an H.264 video stream is a computationally demanding multimedia application which poses serious challenges on current processor architectures. For processors with strongly limited computational resources, a natural way to tackle this problem is the use of multi-core systems. The contribution of this paper lies in a systematic overview and performance evaluation of parallel video decoding approaches. We focus on decoder splittings for strongly resource-restricted environments inherent to mobile devices. For the evaluation, we introduce a high-level methodology which can estimate the runtime behaviour of multi-core decoding architectures. We use this methodology to investigate six methods for accomplishing data-parallel splitting of an H.264 decoder. These methods are compared against each other in terms of runtime complexity, core usage, inter-communication and bus transfers. We present benchmark results using different numbers of processor cores. Our results shall aid in finding the splitting strategy that is best-suited for the targeted hardware-architecture.

Reference

F. Seitner, M. Bleyer, M. Gelautz, R. Beuschel: "Evaluation of data-parallel H.264 decoding approaches for strongly resource-restricted architectures"; Multimedia Tools and Applications, 53 (2011), 2; 431 - 457.

BibTeX

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