Parallel Video Surveillance on the Multi-core Cell Broadband Engine

The IBM Cell Broadband Engine (BE) is a multi-core processor with a PowerPC host processor (PPE) and 8 synergic processor engines (SPEs). The Cell BE architecture is designed to improve upon conventional processors in terms of memory latency, bandwidth and power computation. In this paper, we discuss the parallelization, implementation and performance of a video surveillance application on the IBM Cell BE. We report the video surveillance applicationpsilas performance measured on a computer with one Cell processor and with varying numbers of synergic processor engines enabled. These results were compared to the results obtained on the Cell´s single PPE with all 8 SPEs disabled. The results indicate that our video surveillance application performs approximately 16 times faster on the Cell BE than modern RISC processors by processing input data from five separate surveillance video streams in parallel.