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A Multi-core Architecture Based Parallel Framework for H.264/AVC Deblocking Filters

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Abstract

Deblocking filter is one of the most time consuming modules in the H.264/AVC decoder as indicated in many studies. Therefore, accelerating deblocking filter is critical for improving the overall decoding performance. This paper proposes a novel parallel algorithm for H.264/AVC deblocking filter to speed the H.264/AVC decoder up. We exploit pixel-level data parallelism among filtering steps, and observe that results of each filtering step only affect a limited region of pixels. We call this “the limited propagation effect”. Based on this observation, the proposed algorithm could partition a frame into multiple independent rectangles with arbitrary granularity. The proposed parallel deblocking filter algorithm requires very little synchronization overhead, and provides good scalability. Experimental results show that applying the proposed parallelization method to a SIMD optimized sequential deblocking filter achieves up to 95.31% and 224.07% speedup on a two-core and four-core processor, respectively. We have also observed a significant speedup for H.264/AVC decoding, 21% and 34% on a two-core and four-core processor, respectively.

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Notes

  1. For this set of analysis, the input frames to deblocking filter has gone through the decoding stages preceding deblocking filter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Sung-Wen Wang, Shu-Sian Yang, Hong-Ming Chen, Chia-Lin Yang & Ja-Ling Wu

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  1. Sung-Wen Wang
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  2. Shu-Sian Yang
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  3. Hong-Ming Chen
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  4. Chia-Lin Yang
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  5. Ja-Ling Wu
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Correspondence to Sung-Wen Wang.

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Ja-Ling Wu is a Fellow IEEE.

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Wang, SW., Yang, SS., Chen, HM. et al. A Multi-core Architecture Based Parallel Framework for H.264/AVC Deblocking Filters. J Sign Process Syst Sign Image Video Technol 57, 195–211 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-008-0321-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-008-0321-4

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