Energy efficient low-cost video communications

Abstract

Although traditional video coding is based on complex encoders and simple decoders, more recent codecs can reverse the complexity in order to provide low-cost encoders for mobile devices. However, the complexity is moved from the encoder to the decoder, accumulating high complexity on the decoder side. In this work, a parallel decoding architecture is proposed which exploits multiplecore processors to tackle this high complexity. In particular, the data distribution scheme in this architecture considers two parallelism levels: Group of Pictures and spatial frame distribution. Our results, for a four-core Multicore Processor, it is achieved a time reduction of up to 70% on average, with a negligible Rate-Distortion penalty. In addition, the usage of the CPU is also analyzed, reaching 80% on average and the energy consumption of the decoder is reduced up to 60%.