Complexity analysis of an HEVC decoder based on a digital signal processor

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is a new video coding standard created by the JCT-VC group within ISO/IEC and ITU-T. HEVC is targeted to provide the same quality as H.264 at about half of the bit-rate and will replace soon to its predecessor in multimedia consumer applications. Up to now, only a few decoder implementations have been reported, most of them oriented to carry out a complexity analysis. In this paper, a DSP-based implementation of the HEVC HM9.0 decoder is presented. Up to the best of our knowledge, it is the first DSP-based implementation shown in the scientific literature. Several tests have been carried out to measure the decoder performance and the computational load distribution among its functional blocks. These results have been compared with the ones obtained with the decoder implementations reported up to date. Finally, based on the results obtained in previous works regarding software optimization of DSP-based decoders, realtime could be achieved for SD formats with a single DSP after optimizing our HEVC decoder. For HD formats, multi-DSP technology will be needed.