A two stage parallel encoder scheme for real time video encoder

With the development of hardware technologies, multi-core processor becomes more and more popular. At the same time, the performance of video encoding technologies is greatly improved at the cost of complexity. How to exploit the computing capacity of the multi-core processors efficiently to meet the demand of video encoding technology is a challenging task. Traditional work usually split the frame into slices to enable parallel encoding. But the coding efficiency will lose especially when there are more slices. In this paper, first we propose a two stage real time encoding scheme without splitting the frame into slices. Secondly, some modules in the hybrid video coding scheme, such as interpolation and loop filter, are split into independent modules that can be processed in parallel. A simple and effective task scheduling strategy is also proposed to fully exploit the CPU capacity. Finally, fast algorithms suitable for this architecture are developed. Experimental results show that we can encode the 720p sequence at about 50 fps with little loss in the rate distortion performance.