Abstract
Implementation of video coding systems such as H.264/AVC and AVS on multi-core and many-core platforms is attracting much attention. The slice-level parallelism is popular in parallel video coding for its simplicity and flexibility, however, the video quality loses greatly since the partitioning of slices breaks the dependency between macro-blocks, especially on multi-core or many-core platforms. To address this problem, we propose a Macro-Block Group (MBG) parallel scheme for parallel AVS coding. In the proposed scheme, video frames are equally divided into rectangular MBG regions; each MBG consists of more rows and less columns of macro-blocks than the slice-level scheme. Given that MBG is not syntactically supported by AVS, a vertical partitioning scheme is introduced. Additionally, we use mode confining and motion vector difference adjusting techniques to keep consistent with the standard. Two MBG parallel schemes (5 × 9 MBG partition and 8 × 7 MBG partition) are developed on a TILE64 many-core platform, where P/B frames use the MBG parallel scheme and I frames use the macro-block-level parallelism. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme of 5 × 9 MBG partition can achieve a reduction of 52% (IPPP) and 41% (IBBP) quality loss while keeping the same speed-up compared with the slice-level parallelism. With more cores employed, the scheme of 8 × 7 MBG partition gains 23.9 times of speed-up compared with the single-core implementation and achieves similar coding performance as the 5 × 9 scheme.
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Notes
The AVS1-P2 Jizhun, Zengjiang and Jiaqiang profile only supports slice with complete MB lines, while the Shenzhan profile supports rectangular slices, which can be directly used in realizing the proposed MBG.
This extra core is not taken into account in the calculation of the acceleration efficiency in follow sections.
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Acknowledgements
This paper is partially supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) under contract No. 2009CB320902, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under contract No. 60832004 Beijing Municipal Natural Science Foundation under contract No. 4102025. Especially, we would like to express deep gratitude to our colleagues Kaijin Wei and Qian Huang. This paper would be incomplete without their tremendous contributions.
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Wang, Z., Liang, L., Yang, G. et al. A Novel Macro-Block Group Based AVS Coding Scheme for Many-Core Processor. J Sign Process Syst 65, 129–145 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-010-0543-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-010-0543-0