Journal of Real-Time Image Processing

, Volume 12, Issue 2, pp 549–562 | Cite as

Fast motion estimation for HEVC on graphics processing unit (GPU)

  • Dongkyu Lee
  • Donggyu Sim
  • Keeseong Cho
  • Seoung-Jun Oh
Special Issue Paper
First Online:
Received:
Accepted:

Abstract

The recent video compression standard, HEVC (high efficiency video coding), will most likely be used in various applications in the near future. However, the encoding process is far too slow for real-time applications. At the same time, computing capabilities of GPUs (graphics processing units) have become more powerful in these days. In this paper, we have proposed a GPU-based parallel motion estimation (ME) algorithm to enhance the performance of an HEVC encoder. A frame is partitioned into two subframes for pipelined execution to improve GPU utilization. The flow chart is redetermined to solve data hazards in the pipelined execution. Two new methods are introduced in the proposed ME: decision of a representative search center position (RSCP) and warp-based concurrent parallel reduction (WCPR). A RSCP employs motion vectors of a co-located CTU in a previously encoded frame to solve a dependency problem in parallel computation with negligible coding loss. WCPR concurrently executes several parallel reduction operations, which increases the thread utilization from 20 to 89 % without any thread synchronization. The proposed encoder can make the portion of ME in the encoder negligible with 2.2 % bitrate increase against the HEVC test model (HM) encoder. In terms of ME, the proposed ME is 130.7 times faster than that of the HM encoder.

Keywords

HEVC GPGPU CUDA Motion estimation Parallel reduction 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

This work was partly supported by Institute for Information and communications Technology Promotion (IITP) Grant funded by the Korea government (MSIP) (R0101-15-293, Development of Object-based Knowledge Convergence Service Platform using Image Recognition in Broadcasting Contents) and the Research Grant of Kwangwoon University in 2013.

Compliance with ethical standards

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  • Dongkyu Lee
    • 1
  • Donggyu Sim
    • 2
  • Keeseong Cho
    • 3
  • Seoung-Jun Oh
    • 1
  1. 1.Department of Electronic EngineeringKwangwoon UniversitySeoulKorea
  2. 2.Department of Computer EngineeringKwangwoon UniversitySeoulKorea
  3. 3.Broadcasting and Telecommunications Media Research LaboratoryElectronics and Telecommunications Research InstituteDaejeonKorea

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