Sample-Parallel Execution of EBCOT in Fast Mode

JPEG 2000’s most computationally expensive building block is the Embedded Block Coder with Optimized Truncation (EBCOT). This paper evaluates how encoders targeting a parallel architecture such as a GPU can increase their throughput in use cases where very high data rates are used. The compression efficiency in the less significant bit-planes is then often poor and it is beneficial to enable the Selective Arithmetic Coding Bypass style (fast mode) in order to trade a small loss in compression efficiency for a reduction of the computational complexity. More importantly, this style exposes a more finely grained parallelism that can be exploited to execute the raw coding passes, including bit-stuffing, in a sample-parallel fashion. For a latency- or memory critical application that encodes one frame at a time, EBCOT’s tier-1 is sped up between 1.1x and 2.4x compared to an optimized GPU-based implementation. When a low GPU occupancy has already been addressed by encoding multiple frames in parallel, the throughput can still be improved by 5% for high-entropy images and 27% for low-entropy images. Best results are obtained when enabling the fast mode after the fourth significant bit-plane. For most of the test images the compression rate is within 1% of the original

RLFC: Random Access Light Field Compression using Key Views and Bounded Integer Encoding

We present a new hierarchical compression scheme for encoding light field images (LFI) that is suitable for interactive rendering. Our method (RLFC) exploits redundancies in the light field images by constructing a tree structure. The top level (root) of the tree captures the common high-level details across the LFI, and other levels (children) of the tree capture specific low-level details of the LFI. Our decompressing algorithm corresponds to tree traversal operations and gathers the values stored at different levels of the tree. Furthermore, we use bounded integer sequence encoding which provides random access and fast hardware decoding for compressing the blocks of children of the tree. We have evaluated our method for 4D two-plane parameterized light fields. The compression rates vary from 0.08 - 2.5 bits per pixel (bpp), resulting in compression ratios of around 200:1 to 20:1 for a PSNR quality of 40 to 50 dB. The decompression times for decoding the blocks of LFI are 1 - 3 microseconds per channel on an NVIDIA GTX-960 and we can render new views with a resolution of 512X512 at 200 fps. Our overall scheme is simple to implement and involves only bit manipulations and integer arithmetic operations.Comment: Accepted for publication at Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (I3D '19