Batch-Pipelining for H.264 Decoding on Multicore Systems

Pipelining has been applied in many area to improve performance by overlapping executions of computing stages. However, it is difficult to apply on H.264/AVC decoding in frame level, because the bitstreams are encoded with lots of dependencies and little parallelism is left to be explored. Even slice-level parallelism in H.264 is intuitive, because there is usually only one slice in a frame, it is not very applicable. Therefore, after some software improvement, many researches can only adopt hardware assistance. Fortunately, pure software pipelining can be applied on H.264/AVC decoding in macroblock level with reasonable performance gain.