Real-Time JPEG2000 Video Decoding on General-Purpose Computer Hardware

There is widespread use of compression in multimedia content delivery, e.g. within video on demand services and transport links between live events and production sites. The content must undergo compression prior to transmission in order to deliver high quality video and audio over most networks, this is especially true for high definition video content. JPEG2000 is a recent image compression standard and a suitable compression algorithm for high definition, high rate video. With its highly flexible embedded lossless and lossy compression scheme, JPEG2000 has a number of advantages over existing video codecs. The only evident drawbacks with respect to real-time applications, are that the computational complexity is quite high and that JPEG2000, being an image compression codec as opposed to video codec, typically has higher bandwidth requirements. Special-purpose hardware can deliver high performance, but is expensive and not easily updated. A JPEG2000 decoder application running on general-purpose computer hardware can complement solutions depending on special-purpose hardware and will experience performance scaling together with the available processing power. In addition, production costs will be none-existing, once developed. The application implemented in this project is a streaming media player. It receives a compressed video stream through an IP interface, decodes it frame by frame and presents the decoded frames in a window. The decoder is designed to better take advantage of the processing power available in today's desktop computers. Specifically, decoding is performed on both CPU and GPU in order to decode minimum 50 frames per second of a 720p JPEG2000 video stream. The CPU executed part of the decoder application is written in C++, based on the Kakadu SDK and involve all decoding steps up to and including reverse wavelet transform. The GPU executed part of the decoder is enabled by the CUDA programming language, and include luma upsampling and irreversible color transform. Results indicate that general purpose computer hardware today easily can decode JPEG2000 video at bit rates up to 45 Mbit/s. However, when the video stream is received at 50 fps through the IP interface, packet loss at the socket level limits the attained frame rate to about 45 fps at rates of 40 Mbit/s or lower. If this packet loss could be eliminated, real-time decoding would be obtained up to 40 Mbit/s. At rates above 40 Mbit/s, the attained frame rate is limited by the decoder performance and not the packet loss. Higher codestream rates should be endurable if reverse wavelet transform could be mapped from the CPU to the GPU, since the current pipeline is highly unbalanced

Real-Time JPEG2000 Video Decoding on General-Purpose Computer Hardware

There is widespread use of compression in multimedia content delivery, e.g. within video on demand services and transport links between live events and production sites. The content must undergo compression prior to transmission in order to deliver high quality video and audio over most networks, this is especially true for high definition video content. JPEG2000 is a recent image compression standard and a suitable compression algorithm for high definition, high rate video. With its highly flexible embedded lossless and lossy compression scheme, JPEG2000 has a number of advantages over existing video codecs. The only evident drawbacks with respect to real-time applications, are that the computational complexity is quite high and that JPEG2000, being an image compression codec as opposed to video codec, typically has higher bandwidth requirements. Special-purpose hardware can deliver high performance, but is expensive and not easily updated. A JPEG2000 decoder application running on general-purpose computer hardware can complement solutions depending on special-purpose hardware and will experience performance scaling together with the available processing power. In addition, production costs will be none-existing, once developed. The application implemented in this project is a streaming media player. It receives a compressed video stream through an IP interface, decodes it frame by frame and presents the decoded frames in a window. The decoder is designed to better take advantage of the processing power available in today's desktop computers. Specifically, decoding is performed on both CPU and GPU in order to decode minimum 50 frames per second of a 720p JPEG2000 video stream. The CPU executed part of the decoder application is written in C++, based on the Kakadu SDK and involve all decoding steps up to and including reverse wavelet transform. The GPU executed part of the decoder is enabled by the CUDA programming language, and include luma upsampling and irreversible color transform. Results indicate that general purpose computer hardware today easily can decode JPEG2000 video at bit rates up to 45 Mbit/s. However, when the video stream is received at 50 fps through the IP interface, packet loss at the socket level limits the attained frame rate to about 45 fps at rates of 40 Mbit/s or lower. If this packet loss could be eliminated, real-time decoding would be obtained up to 40 Mbit/s. At rates above 40 Mbit/s, the attained frame rate is limited by the decoder performance and not the packet loss. Higher codestream rates should be endurable if reverse wavelet transform could be mapped from the CPU to the GPU, since the current pipeline is highly unbalanced