The Design and Evaluation of Hierarchical Multi-level Parallelisms for H.264 Encoder on Multi-core Architecture

As a video coding standard, H.264 achieves high compress rate while keeping good fidelity. But it requires more intensive computation than before to get such high coding performance. A Hierarchical Multi-level Parallelisms (HMLP) framework for H.264 encoder is proposed which integrates four level parallelisms - frame-level, slice-level, macroblock-level and data-level into one implementation. Each level parallelism is designed in a hierarchical parallel framework and mapped onto the multi-cores and SIMD units on multi-core architecture. According to the analysis of coding performance on each level parallelism, we propose a method to combine different parallel levels to attain a good compromise between high speedup and low bit-rate. The experimental results show that for CIF format video, our method achieves the speedup of 33.57x-42.3x with 1.04x-1.08x bit-rate increasing on 8-core Intel Xeon processor with SIMD Technology.