Adaptive Slice-Level Parallelism for Real-Time H.264/AVC Encoder with Fast Inter Mode Selection

摘要

In order to achieve high computational performance and low power consumption, modern microprocessors are usually equipped with special multimedia instructions, multi-threading, and/or multi-core processing capabilities. Therefore, parallelizing H.264/AVC algorithm is crucial in implementing real-time encoder on multi-thread (or -core) processor. Also, there is a significant need for investigation on complexity reduction algorithms such as fast inter mode selection. Multi-core system makes it possible to uniformly distribute workloads of H.264/AVC over a number of slower and simpler processor cores each consisting of single high performance processor. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new adaptive slice size selection technique for efficient slice-level parallelism of H.264/AVC encoder on multi-core (or multi-thread) processor using fast inter mode selection as a pre-processing. The simulation results show that the proposed adaptive slice-level parallelism has a good parallel performance compared to fixed slice size parallelism. The experiment methods and results can be applied to many multi-processor systems for real-time H.264 video encoding.