Real-time H.264 Encoder with Deblocking Filter Parallelization

Real-time H.264 encoding of HD video is still a heavy task for today's high-end PC processors. To improve the encoding speed, we introduce thread-level parallelism to our H.264 encoder. However, the parallelized encoder with slice-level decomposition sometimes causes observable artifacts in encoded image. We propose a new parallelization technique for deblocking filtering that can reduce the artifacts without degrading the parallel processing efficiency. Experimental results indicate that our parallelized encoder improves processing speed by a factor of 5.9 with 8 threads. This is achieved without any noticeable artifact. We can achieve real-time H.264 HD (720p 30fps) visual communication on a PC platform.