A Multi-core Architecture Based Parallel Framework for H.264/AVC Deblocking Filters

摘要

Deblocking filter is one of the most time consuming modules in the H.264/AVC decoder as indicated in many studies. Therefore, accelerating deblocking filter is critical for improving the overall decoding performance. This paper proposes a novel parallel algorithm for H.264/AVC deblocking filter to speed the H.264/AVC decoder up. We exploit pixel-level data parallelism among filtering steps, and observe that results of each filtering step only affect a limited region of pixels. We call this "the limited propagation effect". Based on this observation, the proposed algorithm could partition a frame into multiple independent rectangles with arbitrary granularity. The proposed parallel deblocking filter algorithm requires very little synchronization overhead, and provides good scalability. Experimental results show that applying the proposed parallelization method to a SIMD optimized sequential deblocking filter achieves up to 95.31% and 224.07% speedup on a two-core and four-core processor, respectively. We have also observed a significant speedup for H.264/AVC decoding, 21% and 34% on a two-core and four-core processor, respectively.