Embedded Real-Time H264/AVC High Definition Video Encoder on TI’s KeyStone Multicore DSP

To overcome high computational complexity of advanced video encoders for emerging applications that require real-time processing, multicore technology can be one of the promising solutions to meet this constraint. In this context, this paper presents a parallel implementation of the H264/AVC high definition (HD) video encoder exploiting the power processing of eight-core digital signal processor (DSP) TMS320C6678. GOP Level Parallelism approach is used to improve the encoding speed and meet the real-time encoding compliant. A master core is reserved to handle data transfer between the DSP and the camera interface via a Gigabit Ethernet link. Multithreading algorithm and ping-pong buffers technique are used to enhance the classic GOP level parallelism approach and hide communication overhead. Experimental results on seven slave DSP cores, running each at 1 GHz, show that our implementation allows performing a real-time HD (1280 × 720) video encoding. The achieved encoding speed is up to 28 f/s. The proposed parallel implementation accelerates the encoding process by a factor of 6.7 without inducing quality degradation in terms of PSNR or bit-rate increase compared to single core implementation. Experiments show that our proposed scheduling technique for hiding communication overhead saves up to 36 % of the fully encoding chain time which includes frames capturing, frames encoding and bitstream saving in a file.