Implementation of a Real-Time Versatile Video Coding Decoder Based on VVdeC Over an Embedded Multicore Platform

Abstract

The current state-of-the-art video coding standard versatile video coding (VVC) offers 50% bit rate savings over its predecessor high efficiency video coding (HEVC) while maintaining the same quality at the cost of a significant increase in the computational complexity. In this work, an Embedded General Purpose Processor (EGPP) with Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) optimisations suite was used to accelerate an open-source software decoder for achieving real-time decoding over an embedded multi-core platform with 8 cores. The decoding speedup has been analyzed with different number of threads/cores, showing that performance increases linearly. This suggests that multi-core based performance for this solution did not reach the saturation point with 8 cores and more parallelism is possible using a higher number of cores. Thanks to the optimization process, <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times 2$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times 2.4$ </tex-math></inline-formula> speedups have been obtained in the decoding time for All Intra and Random Access sequences, respectively. With these results, real-time decoding is achieved for High Definition (HD) sequences. The implementation of a real-time VVC decoder for a low resources embedded platform is the main contribution of this research.