Heuristics for tile parallelism in HEVC

Abstract

HEVC has emerged as the new video coding standard promising increased compression ratios compared to its predecessors. This performance improvement comes at a high computational cost. For this reason, HEVC offers three coarse grained parallelization potentials namely, wave front, slices and tiles. In this paper we focus on tile parallelism which is a relatively new concept with its effects not yet fully explored. Particularly, we investigate the problem of partitioning a frame into tiles so that in a resulting one on one tile-CPU core assignment the cores are load balanced, thus, maximum speedup can be achieved. We propose various heuristics for the problem with a focus on low delay coding and evaluate them against state of the art approaches. Results demonstrate that particular heuristic combinations clearly outperform their counterparts in the literature. © EURASIP 2017.