Reducing the complexity of a multiview H.264/AVC and HEVC hybrid architecture

With the advent of 3D displays, an efficient encoder is required to compress the video information needed by them. Moreover, for gradual market acceptance of this new technology, it is advisable to offer backward compatibility with existing devices. Thus, a multiview H.264/Advance Video Coding (AVC) and High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) hybrid architecture was proposed in the standardization process of HEVC. However, it requires long encoding times due to the use of HEVC. With the aim of tackling this problem, this paper presents an algorithm that reduces the complexity of this hybrid architecture by reducing the encoding complexity of the HEVC views. By using Na < ve-Bayes classifiers, the proposed technique exploits the information gathered in the encoding of the H.264/AVC view to make decisions on the splitting of coding units in HEVC side views. Given the novelty of the proposal, the only similar work found in the literature is an unoptimized version of the algorithm presented here. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve a good tradeoff between coding efficiency and complexity

High Performance Multiview Video Coding

Following the standardization of the latest video coding standard High Efficiency Video Coding in 2013, in 2014, multiview extension of HEVC (MV-HEVC) was published and brought significantly better compression performance of around 50% for multiview and 3D videos compared to multiple independent single-view HEVC coding. However, the extremely high computational complexity of MV-HEVC demands significant optimization of the encoder. To tackle this problem, this work investigates the possibilities of using modern parallel computing platforms and tools such as single-instruction-multiple-data (SIMD) instructions, multi-core CPU, massively parallel GPU, and computer cluster to significantly enhance the MVC encoder performance. The aforementioned computing tools have very different computing characteristics and misuse of the tools may result in poor performance improvement and sometimes even reduction. To achieve the best possible encoding performance from modern computing tools, different levels of parallelism inside a typical MVC encoder are identified and analyzed. Novel optimization techniques at various levels of abstraction are proposed, non-aggregation massively parallel motion estimation (ME) and disparity estimation (DE) in prediction unit (PU), fractional and bi-directional ME/DE acceleration through SIMD, quantization parameter (QP)-based early termination for coding tree unit (CTU), optimized resource-scheduled wave-front parallel processing for CTU, and workload balanced, cluster-based multiple-view parallel are proposed. The result shows proposed parallel optimization techniques, with insignificant loss to coding efficiency, significantly improves the execution time performance. This , in turn, proves modern parallel computing platforms, with appropriate platform-specific algorithm design, are valuable tools for improving the performance of computationally intensive applications