Tile Adaptation for Workload Balancing of 3D-HEVC Encoder in Homogeneous Multicore Systems

Abstract

This paper proposes a tile adaptation for workload balancing to speed up the 3D-High Efficiency Video Coding (3D-HEVC) encoder. Experiments were done to evaluate the usage of tiles when encoding texture and depth maps considering a static uniform partitioning. Based on these evaluations, we observed that the encoding workload of neighboring frames in the same view tends to be similar. Moreover, the encoding workload of dependent views can be predicted using the information of previously encoded frames of the same and base views. Therefore, the proposed solution adaptively defines the boundaries of the tiles based on inter-frame and inter-view correlations to balance the workloads of the tiles, resulting in a higher speedup when executing in homogeneous multicore systems. The proposed method was implemented in 3D-HEVC Test Model and evaluated according to the Common Test Conditions. The results demonstrated that the proposed solution speeds up texture and depth map coding from 9.94% to 18.21%, when compared to the uniform-sized tiles, without coding efficiency loss. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first work proposing a complete solution for speeding up the 3D-HEVC video encoder by balancing the tiles workload dynamically.