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Evaluation of data-parallel H.264 decoding approaches for strongly resource-restricted architectures

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Abstract

Decoding of an H.264 video stream is a computationally demanding multimedia application which poses serious challenges on current processor architectures. For processors with strongly limited computational resources, a natural way to tackle this problem is the use of multi-core systems. The contribution of this paper lies in a systematic overview and performance evaluation of parallel video decoding approaches. We focus on decoder splittings for strongly resource-restricted environments inherent to mobile devices. For the evaluation, we introduce a high-level methodology which can estimate the runtime behaviour of multi-core decoding architectures. We use this methodology to investigate six methods for accomplishing data-parallel splitting of an H.264 decoder. These methods are compared against each other in terms of runtime complexity, core usage, inter-communication and bus transfers. We present benchmark results using different numbers of processor cores. Our results shall aid in finding the splitting strategy that is best-suited for the targeted hardware-architecture.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Transport, Innovation, and Technology under the FIT-IT project VENDOR (Project nr. 812429). Michael Bleyer would like to acknowledge the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) for financial support under project P19797.

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  1. Institute for Software Technology and Interactive Systems, Vienna University of Technology, Favoritenstrasse 9-11/188/2, 1040, Vienna, Austria

    Florian H. Seitner, Michael Bleyer, Margrit Gelautz & Ralf M. Beuschel

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  1. Florian H. Seitner
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  2. Michael Bleyer
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  3. Margrit Gelautz
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  4. Ralf M. Beuschel
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Correspondence to Florian H. Seitner.

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Seitner, F.H., Bleyer, M., Gelautz, M. et al. Evaluation of data-parallel H.264 decoding approaches for strongly resource-restricted architectures. Multimed Tools Appl 53, 431–457 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-010-0501-7

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