Implementation of fast HEVC encoder based on SIMD and data-level parallelism

• Published in: EURASIP journal on image and video processing Vol. 2014; no. 1; pp. 1 - 19
• Main Authors: Ahn, Yong-Jo, Hwang, Tae-Jin, Sim, Dong-Gyu, Han, Woo-Jin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 26.03.2014; BioMed Central Ltd
• Subjects: Algorithms; Biometrics; Coders; Coding; Computation; Computer programs; Encoders; Encoding; Engineering; Image Processing and Computer Vision; Pattern Recognition; Signal,Image and Speech Processing; Software; HEVC encoder; HEVC; Load balancing; SIMD implementation; Slice-level parallelism
• ISSN: 1687-5281; 1687-5176; 1687-5281
• DOI: 10.1186/1687-5281-2014-16

This paper presents several optimization algorithms for a High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) encoder based on single instruction multiple data (SIMD) operations and data-level parallelism. Based on the analysis of the computational complexity of HEVC encoder, we found that interpolation filter, cost function, and transform take around 68% of the total computation, on average. In this paper, several software optimization techniques, including frame-level interpolation filter and SIMD implementation for those computationally intensive parts, are presented for a fast HEVC encoder. In addition, we propose a slice-level parallelization and its load-balancing algorithm on multi-core platforms from the estimated computational load of each slice during the encoding process. The encoding speed of the proposed parallelized HEVC encoder is accelerated by approximately ten times compared to the HEVC reference model (HM) software, with minimal loss of coding efficiency.