A high-level simulator for the H.264/AVC decoding process in multi-core systems
Florian H. Seitner, Ralf M. Schreier, Michael Bleyer, Margrit Gelautz · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2008
H.264 as a new-generation video coding algorithm is becoming increasingly important for international broadcasting standards such as DVB-H and DMB. In comparison to its predecessors MPEG-2 and MEPG-4 SP/ASP, H.264 achieves improved compression effciency at the cost of increased computational complexity. Real-time execution of the H.264 decoding process poses a large challenge on mobile devices due to low processing capabilities. Multi-core systems provide an elegant and power-effcient solution to overcome this performance limitation. However, effciently distributing the video algorithm among multiple processing units is a non-trivial task. It requires detailed knowledge about the algorithmic complexity, dynamic variations and inter-dependencies between functional blocks. The objective of this paper is an investigation on the dynamic behavior of the H.264 decoding process and on the interaction between the main decoding tasks in the context of multi-core environments. We use an H.264 decoder model to investigate the effciency of a decoding system under various conditions (e.g. different FIFO buffer sizes, bitstreams, coding features and bitrates). The gained insights are finally used to optimize the runtime behavior of a multi-core decoding system and to find a good trade-off between core usage and buffer sizes.