A Parallelization Technique with Integrated Multi-Threading for Video Decoding on Multi-core Systems

Increasing demand for Full High-Definition (FHD) video and Ultra High-Definition (UHD) video services has led to active research on high speed video processing. Widespread deployment of multi-core systems has accelerated studies on high resolution video processing based on parallelization of multimedia software. Even if parallelization of a specific decoding step may improve decoding performance partially, such partial parallelization may not result in sufficient performance improvement. Particularly, entropy decoding has often been considered separately from other decoding steps since the entropy decoding step could not be parallelized easily. In this paper, we propose a parallelization technique called Integrated Multi-Threaded Parallelization (IMTP) which takes parallelization of the entropy decoding step, with other decoding steps, into consideration in an integrated fashion. We used the Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) technique with appropriate thread scheduling techniques to achieve the best performance for the entire decoding step. The speedup of the proposed IMTP method is up to 3.35 times faster with respect to the entire decoding time over a conventional decoding technique for H.264/AVC videos.