Integer-Pel Motion Estimation for HEVC on Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA)

Abstract

A new video compression standard called High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) has recently been released onto the market. HEVC provides higher coding performance compared to previous standards, but at the cost of a significant increase in encoding complexity, particularly in motion estimation (ME). At the same time, the computing capabilities of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have become more powerful. This paper proposes a parallel integer-pel ME (IME) algorithm for HEVC on GPU using the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). In the proposed IME, concurrent parallel reduction (CPR) is introduced. CPR performs several parallel reduction (PR) operations concurrently to solve two problems in conventional PR; low thread utilization and high thread synchronization latency. The proposed encoder reduces the portion of IME in the encoder to almost zero with a 2.3% increase in bitrate. In terms of IME, the proposed IME is up to 172.6 times faster than the IME in the HEVC reference model.