Analysis of the transaction of data for a scalable video decoder

Abstract

It is highly desirable to know in advance the transaction of data in the design of any electronic embedded system. It is of especial interest for data-intensive applications, such as complex video systems, when the options available in the video decoder continuously change and/or the features of the input video sequences are different. This paper exposes the development of a profiling tool intended to assist the designer on the decision making based on the transaction of data during the decoding of video sequences using the H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC) standard. The tool incorporates some Python scripts that allow the designer to analyze the data transaction in the video decoder, with several automatic profiling utilities for the management of bitstreams and decoding tasks. Using the profiling scripts, the results show that the data transaction load changes based on the intrinsic characteristics of the video sequence and on the scalable options selected. Due to the huge number of functions that form part of the SVC video decoder, a set of modules that better describe the internal structure of the decoder has been defined. The allocation of functions to modules is open to the designer and can be changed at any time to accommodate changes in the system. This environment allows the system designer to make better decisions about the load distribution of data transactions, based on the modules defined inside the tool to create the profile.