Adaptive slice-level parallelism for H.264/AVC encoding using pre macroblock mode selection

In order to achieve high computational performance and low power consumption, many modern microprocessors are equipped with special multimedia instructions and multi-core processing capabilities. The number of cores on a single chip increases double every three years. Therefore, besides complexity reduction by smart algorithms such as fast macroblock mode selection, an effective algorithm for parallelizing H.264/AVC is also very crucial in implementing a real-time encoder on a multi-core system. This algorithm serves to uniformly distribute workloads for H.264/AVC encoding over several slower and simpler processor cores on a single chip. In this paper, we propose a new adaptive slice-size selection technique for efficient slice-level parallelism of H.264/AVC encoding on a multi-core processor using fast macroblock mode selection as a pre-processing step. For this we propose an estimation method for the computational complexity of each macroblock using pre macroblock mode selection. Simulation results, with a number of test video sequences, show that, without any noticeable degradation, the proposed fast macroblock mode selection reduces the total encoding time by about 57.30%. The proposed adaptive slice-level parallelism has good parallel performance compared to conventional fixed slice-size parallelism. The proposed method can be applied to many multi-core systems for real-time H.264 video encoding.