Lossless image compression exploiting streaming model for efficient execution on multicores

Abstract

Image and video coding play a critical role in present multimedia systems ranging from entertainment to specialized applications such as telemedicine. Usually, they are hand-customized for every intended architecture in order to meet performance requirements. This approach is neither portable nor scalable. With the advent of multicores new challenges emerged for programmers related to both efficient utilization of additional resources and scalable performance. For image and video processing applications, streaming model of computation showed to be effective in tackling these challenges. In this paper, we report the efforts to improve the execution performance of the CBPC, our compute intensive lossless image compression algorithm described in [1]. The algorithm is based on highly adaptive and predictive modeling, outperforming many other methods in compression efficiency, although with increased complexity. We employ a high-level performance optimization approach which exploits streaming model for scalability and portability. We obtain this by detecting computationally demanding parts of the algorithm and implementing them in StreamIt, an architecture-independent stream language which goal is to improve programming productivity and parallelization efficiency by exposing the parallelism and communication pattern. We developed an interface that enables the integration and hosting of streaming kernels into the host application developed in general-purpose language.