Implementation of H.264 decoder on general-purpose processors with media instructions

Xiaosong Zhou; Eric Q Li; Yen-Kuang Chen

doi:10.1117/12.484746

7 May 2003 Implementation of H.264 decoder on general-purpose processors with media instructions

Xiaosong Zhou, Eric Q Li, Yen-Kuang Chen

Proceedings Volume 5022, Image and Video Communications and Processing 2003; (2003) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.484746
Event: Electronic Imaging 2003, 2003, Santa Clara, CA, United States

Abstract

As emerging video coding standards, e.g. H.264, aim at high-quality video contents at low bit-rates, the encoding and decoding processes require much more computation than most existing standards do. This paper analyzes software implementation of a real-time H.264 decoder on general-purpose processors with media instructions. Specifically, we discuss how to optimize the speed of H.264 decoders on Intel Pentium 4 processors. This paper first analyzes the reference implementation to identify the time-consuming modules. Our study shows that a number of components, e.g., motion compensation and inverse integer transform, are the most time-consuming modules in the H.264 decoder. Second, we present a list of performance optimization methods using media instructions to improve the efficiency of these modules. After appropriate optimizations, the decoder speed improved by more than 3x---it can decode a 720×480 resolution video sequence at 48 frames per second on 2.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 processors compared to reference software’s 12 frames per second. The optimization techniques demonstrated in this paper can also be applied to other video/image processing applications. Additionally, after presenting detailed application behavior on general-purpose processors, this paper discusses a few recommendations on how to design future efficient/powerful video/image applications/standards with given hardware implications.

Citation Download Citation

Xiaosong Zhou, Eric Q Li, and Yen-Kuang Chen "Implementation of H.264 decoder on general-purpose processors with media instructions", Proc. SPIE 5022, Image and Video Communications and Processing 2003, (7 May 2003); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.484746

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