A DSP Based H.264 Decoder for a Multi-Format IP Set-Top Box

In this paper, the implementation of a digital signal processor (DSP) based H.264 decoder for a multi-format set-top box is described. Baseline and main profiles are supported. Using several software optimization techniques, the decoder has been fitted into a low-cost DSP. The decoder alone has been tested in simulation, achieving real-time performance with a 600 MHz system clock. Moreover, it has been integrated in a multi-format IP set-top box allowing the implementation of actual environment tests with excellent results. Finally, the decoder has been ported to a latest generation DSP

Implementation And Optimizaton Of Real-time H.264 Baseline Encoder On Tms320dm642 Dsp

Tez (Yüksek Lisans) -- İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi, Fen Bilimleri Enstitüsü, 2007Thesis (M.Sc.) -- İstanbul Technical University, Institute of Science and Technology, 2007Günümüzde sayısal video kodlama sayısal gözetim sistemleri, video konferans, mobil uygulamalar ve video yayını gibi bir çok uygulamada zorunlu hale gelmiştir. Uluslararası bir video sıkıştırma standardı olan H.264/MPEG-4 bölüm 10, daha önceki standartlara göre kodlama verimini iyileştirmek amacıyla geliştirilmiştir. Fakat, bu kodlama geliştirmesi beraberinde kodlama karmaşıklığının da artmasına yol açmaktadır. Bu tez çalışmasında Texas Instruments TMS320DM642 sayısal sinyal işleyici üzerinde H.264 temel profil kodlayıcı gerçeklenmiştir. DM642 DSP çekirdeği üzerindeki gerçek zamanlı H.264/AVC kodlayıcı uygulaması hata esnekliği araçları ve çeyrek piksel hareket dengeleme dışında standart tüm H.264/AVC temel profil kodlama araçlarını sunmaktadır. Çeyrek piksel hareket dengelem yerine, tüm parlaklılık ve renklik bileşenleri için tam sayı ve yarım piksel pozisyonlarında hareket kestirim ve dengeleme gerçeklenmiştir. Kullanılan DM642 DSP çekirdeği platformu, 2-seviyeli bellek/önbellek aşama düzenine sahip ve VLIW içeren yüksek performanslı sayısal işlemci olarak tasarlanmıştır. Sunulan H.264 temel kodlayıcı sistemin gerçeklenmesi ve eniyilemesi bu tezin konusudur. Üstelik, algoritma bazlı, mimari ve bellek stratejilerini içeren eniyileme çalışma fazları detaylarıyla açıklanmaktadır. H.264/AVC video kodlayıcının hem geliştirme ortamında hem de DM642 EVM donanım ortamında çalışması doğrulanmıştır. Kısaca, kodlayıcı sisteme giriş olan CIF çözünürlükte sıkıştırılmamış YUV video dizisi H.264 Annex-B dosya biçiminde ve de ekrana video çıktı verilerek sıkıştırılmaktadır. Ek olarak, kodlayıcı çıktısı H.264 referans yazılımla doğruluğu kontrol edilmiş ve uyumluluğu kanıtlanmıştır.Recently, digital video coding is mandatory in many applications such as digital surveillance systems, video conferencing, mobile applications as well as video broadcasts. The H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10, an international video compression standard, is developed for improving the coding efficiency compared to previous standards. However, the coding improvement comes with an increase in coding complexity. In this thesis, an H.264 baseline profile encoder is implemented on Texas Instruments TMS320DM642 digital signal processor. The real-time implementation of the H.264/AVC encoder on DM642 DSP core offers most of the standard H.264/AVC baseline profile coding tools except error resiliency tools and quarter-pel motion estimation. Instead of quarter-pel motion compensation, integer and half pixel position motion estimation and compensation for all luminance and chrominance components are implemented. The target platform, DM64 DSP core, is designed as a high-performance digital media processor with two-level memory/cache hierarchy and VLIW architecture. The subject of the thesis is H.264 baseline encoder system realization and optimization on the target platform. Moreover, the study of optimization phases covering algorithmic, architectural and memory strategies are clarified in details. The H.264/AVC encoder system is verified both to execute on the development workstation and DM642 EVM (Evaluation Module) hardware platform. Briefly, the uncompressed input of a YUV video sequence with CIF resolution to the encoder system is compressed to H.264 Annex-B file format and displayed on screen. Additionally, the encoder output is verified with H.264 reference software and the compliancy is proven.Yüksek LisansM.Sc

MPEG Reconfigurable Video Coding: From specification to a reconfigurable implementation

International audienceThis paper demonstrates that it is possible to produce automatic, reconfigurable, and portable implementations of multimedia decoders onto platforms with the help of the MPEG Reconfigurable Video Coding (RVC) standard. MPEG RVC is a new formalism standardized by the MPEGconsortium used to specify multimedia decoders. It produces visual representations of decoder reference software, with the help of graphs that connect several coding tools from MPEG standards. The approach developed in this paper draws on Dataflow Process Networks to produce a Minimal and Canonical Representation (MCR) of \MPEG\ \RVC\ specifications. The \MCR\ makes it possible to form automatic and reconfigurable implementations of decoders which can match any actual platforms. The contribution is demonstrated on one case study where a generic decoder needs to process a multimedia content with the help of the \RVC\ specification of the decoder required to process it. The overall approach is tested on two decoders from MPEG, namely MPEG-4 part 2 Simple Profile and MPEG-4 part 10 Constrained Baseline Profile. The results validate the following benefits on the \MCR\ of decoders: compact representation, low overhead induced by its compilation, reconfiguration and multi-core abilities

VLSI architecture design approaches for real-time video processing

This paper discusses the programmable and dedicated approaches for real-time video processing applications. Various VLSI architecture including the design examples of both approaches are reviewed. Finally, discussions of several practical designs in real-time video processing applications are then considered in VLSI architectures to provide significant guidelines to VLSI designers for any further real-time video processing design works

Side information exploitation, quality control and low complexity implementation for distributed video coding

Distributed video coding (DVC) is a new video coding methodology that shifts the highly complex motion search components from the encoder to the decoder, such a video coder would have a great advantage in encoding speed and it is still able to achieve similar rate-distortion performance as the conventional coding solutions. Applications include wireless video sensor networks, mobile video cameras and wireless video surveillance, etc. Although many progresses have been made in DVC over the past ten years, there is still a gap in RD performance between conventional video coding solutions and DVC. The latest development of DVC is still far from standardization and practical use. The key problems remain in the areas such as accurate and efficient side information generation and refinement, quality control between Wyner-Ziv frames and key frames, correlation noise modelling and decoder complexity, etc. Under this context, this thesis proposes solutions to improve the state-of-the-art side information refinement schemes, enable consistent quality control over decoded frames during coding process and implement highly efficient DVC codec. This thesis investigates the impact of reference frames on side information generation and reveals that reference frames have the potential to be better side information than the extensively used interpolated frames. Based on this investigation, we also propose a motion range prediction (MRP) method to exploit reference frames and precisely guide the statistical motion learning process. Extensive simulation results show that choosing reference frames as SI performs competitively, and sometimes even better than interpolated frames. Furthermore, the proposed MRP method is shown to significantly reduce the decoding complexity without degrading any RD performance. To minimize the block artifacts and achieve consistent improvement in both subjective and objective quality of side information, we propose a novel side information synthesis framework working on pixel granularity. We synthesize the SI at pixel level to minimize the block artifacts and adaptively change the correlation noise model according to the new SI. Furthermore, we have fully implemented a state-of-the-art DVC decoder with the proposed framework using serial and parallel processing technologies to identify bottlenecks and areas to further reduce the decoding complexity, which is another major challenge for future practical DVC system deployments. The performance is evaluated based on the latest transform domain DVC codec and compared with different standard codecs. Extensive experimental results show substantial and consistent rate-distortion gains over standard video codecs and significant speedup over serial implementation. In order to bring the state-of-the-art DVC one step closer to practical use, we address the problem of distortion variation introduced by typical rate control algorithms, especially in a variable bit rate environment. Simulation results show that the proposed quality control algorithm is capable to meet user defined target distortion and maintain a rather small variation for sequence with slow motion and performs similar to fixed quantization for fast motion sequence at the cost of some RD performance. Finally, we propose the first implementation of a distributed video encoder on a Texas Instruments TMS320DM6437 digital signal processor. The WZ encoder is efficiently implemented, using rate adaptive low-density-parity-check accumulative (LDPCA) codes, exploiting the hardware features and optimization techniques to improve the overall performance. Implementation results show that the WZ encoder is able to encode at 134M instruction cycles per QCIF frame on a TMS320DM6437 DSP running at 700MHz. This results in encoder speed 29 times faster than non-optimized encoder implementation. We also implemented a highly efficient DVC decoder using both serial and parallel technology based on a PC-HPC (high performance cluster) architecture, where the encoder is running in a general purpose PC and the decoder is running in a multicore HPC. The experimental results show that the parallelized decoder can achieve about 10 times speedup under various bit-rates and GOP sizes compared to the serial implementation and significant RD gains with regards to the state-of-the-art DISCOVER codec

A flexible heterogeneous hardware/software solution for real-time high-definition H.264 motion estimation

International audienceThe MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 video compression standard introduces a high degree of motion estimation complexity. Quarter-pixel accuracy and variable block-size significantly enhance compression performances over previous standards, but increase computation requirements. Firstly, a DSP-based solution achieves real-time integer motion estimation. Nevertheless, fractional-pixel refinement is too computationally intensive to be efficiently processed on a software-based processor. Secondly, to address this restriction, a flexible and low complexity VLSI sub-pixel refinement coprocessor is designed. Thanks to an improved datapath, a high throughput is achieved with low logic resources. Finally, we propose a heterogeneous (DSP-FPGA) solution to handle real-time motion estimation with variable block-size and fractional-pixel accuracy for high-definition video. It combines efficiency and programmability. The flexibility offers complexity versus performance trade-offs. The system achieves motion estimation of 720p sequences at up to 60 frames per second

Realization of Embedded Multimedia System Based On Dual-Core Processor OMAP5910

This paper focuses on the realization of a complete embedded system using the dual-core processor OMAP5910. Detailed description of how to compose the hardware system is presented with a description of the software system on our platform. Tasks communication between the two cores is realized using the DSP driver. The system bootloader and the DSP bootloader are described in detail. The implementation of the MPEG-4 video decoder has been realized on the presented system. Higher speed can be achieved and less power is needed for MPEG-4 video processing on the dual-core platform. This dual-core system can be applied to 3G wireless communication, robot control and vision systems

Design and implementation of a DSP based MPEG-1 audio encoder

The speed of current PCs enables them to decode and play an MPEG bitstream in real time. The encoding process, however, cannot be done in real-time. The purpose of this thesis is to produce a low-cost real-time Digital Signal Processor (DSP) implementation of an MPEG encoder. The DSP will provide an MPEG bitstream to the PC that can be saved to disk. The input to the DSP will be an analog audio signal. A codec provides the DSP with 16-bit samples of the signal. The DSP compresses these 16-bit samples using MPEG-1 layer 1 compression. Then it formats the compressed data to the correct MPEG-1 bitstream, and transmits it to the PC over its byte-wide host interface. On the PC side, a program receives the data from the DSP and saves the MPEG data to the disk. An MPEG-1 layer 1 player can play the resulting file