Title
Efficient Framework for Macroblock prediction and parallel task assignment in video coding
Abstract
Video coding is an integral part of numerous real-time multimedia applications such as video telephony, telemedicine, video conferencing and video streaming. In real-time multimedia systems or power constrained systems, the coding performance of modern video coding standards such as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) and H.264/MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding (AVC), is limited by computational complexity. This thesis presents research work to develop techniques to reduce the computational complexity of video encoders and to exploit their data and task level parallelism. These techniques aim to provide significant complexity saving as well as improving coding efficiency.
A computationally efficient framework for macroblock prediction is developed to reduce the computational complexity and overheads related to the macroblock prediction process in video encoding. The framework consists of several innovative techniques to exclude as many intra and inter prediction modes as possible prior to the RDO (rate distortion optimization) process. In the best case, the proposed framework selects one MB type either intra or inter and one corresponding near-optimal prediction mode, so that the complete RDO process is neglected. Simulation results show that the proposed framework achieves significant complexity savings without any significant degradation in video quality.
In addition, a complexity reduction technique for motion compensation is developed to perform inter prediction. This addresses the computational complexity issues related to both interpolation and data manipulation modules of the motion compensation process. The end results of the experiments display that this method prominently decreases the computational complexity without loss in rate-distortion performance.
Finally, an end-to-end hybrid hardware-software implementation scheme based on pipelining and multitasking for advanced video coding is presented. This scheme exploits the task and data level parallelism in video encoders to improve their coding efficiency. The parallelism is exploited at both coarse-grain level and fine-grain level. The coarse-grain level parallelism exploitation is done by concurrently executing multiple tasks on different processing cores while fine-grain level parallelism is achieved by using SIMD (single instruction multiple data) instructions. Such exploitation of parallelism also helps to better utilize the computational power offered by advanced media processors. The outcomes of the experiments reveal that suggested scheme has resulted in enhancing the encoding rate and reducing power consumption.
In the field of video coding the main achievement of this research can be given in a nut shell as: (a) Development of computationally efficient techniques for macroblock prediction type and partition selection. (b) Development of complexity reduction algorithm based on intra and inter prediction mode selection. (c) Development of a computationally efficient scheme for motion compensation. Finally, (d) development of end-to-end hybrid implementation scheme for H.264/AVC encoder that exploits its data and task level parallelism to improve coding efficiency
These innovative techniques may prove handy in real-time implementation of H.264/AVC and HEVC video encoders in computationally constrained environments as is the case in general purpose computers and low-power mobile devices.