A novel macro-block group based AVS coding scheme for many-core processor

Abstract

The slice-level parallelism is popular in parallel video coding. However, the quality loses greatly because the dependency between macro-blocks is broken, especially on many-core platforms. To address this problem, a novel Macro-Block Group (MBG) decomposition scheme is presented for parallel AVS coding. In the proposed scheme, video frames are equally divided into rectangular MBG regions, each consists of more rows and less columns than the slice-level scheme. Since MBG is not supported by AVS, a vertical partitioning scheme is introduced, and the mode confining and MVD adjusting techniques are utilized to keep consistency with the standard. In practice, our parallel encoder is developed on the TILE64 platform, where P/B frames use the MBG-level parallelism and I frames use the macro-block-level parallelism. Experiments show that the proposed scheme can achieve a reduction of 52% (IPPP) and 41% (IBBP) in quality loss while keeping the same speed-up compared with the slice-level parallelism. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.