Abstract-Unlike H.264/advanced video coding, where parallelism was an afterthought, High Efficiency Video Coding currently contains several proposals aimed at making it more parallel-friendly. A performance comparison of the different proposals, however, has not yet been performed. In this paper, we will fill this gap by presenting efficient implementations of the most promising parallelization proposals, namely tiles and wavefront parallel processing (WPP). In addition, we present a novel approach called overlapped wavefront (OWF), which achieves higher performance and efficiency than tiles and WPP. Experiments conducted on a 12-core system running at 3.33 GHz show that our implementations achieve average speedups, for 4k sequences, of 8.7, 9.3, and 10.7 for WPP, tiles, and OWF, respectively.Index Terms-High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), parallel programming, video coding.
Immersive video often refers to multiple views with texture and scene geometry information, from which different viewports can be synthesized on the client side. To design efficient immersive video coding solutions, it is desirable to minimize bitrate, pixel rate and complexity. We investigate whether the classical approach of sending the geometry of a scene as depth maps is appropriate to serve this purpose. Previous work shows that bypassing depth transmission entirely and estimating depth at the client side improves the synthesis performance while saving bitrate and pixel rate. In order to understand if the encoder side depth maps contain information that is beneficial to be transmitted, we first explore a hybrid approach which enables partial depth map transmission using a block-based RD-based decision in the depth coding process. This approach reveals that partial depth map transmission may improve the rendering performance but does not present a good compromise in terms of compression efficiency. This led us to address the remaining drawbacks of decoder side depth estimation: complexity and depth map inaccuracy. We propose a novel system that takes advantage of high quality depth maps at the server side by encoding them into lightweight features that support the depth estimator at the client side. These features allow reducing the amount of data that has to be handled during decoder side depth estimation by 88%, which significantly speeds up the cost computation and the energy minimization of the depth estimator. Furthermore, -46.0% and -37.9% average synthesis BD-Rate gains are achieved compared to the classical approach with depth maps estimated at the encoder.
In an increasingly connected world, consumer video experiences have diversified away from traditional broadcast video into new applications with increased use of non-cameracaptured content such as computer screen desktop recordings or animations created by computer rendering, collectively referred to as screen content. There has also been increased use of graphics and character content that is rendered and mixed or overlaid together with camera-generated content. The emerging Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard, in its first version, addresses this market change by the specification of low-level coding tools suitable for screen content. This is in contrast to its predecessor, the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, where highly efficient screen content support is only available in extension profiles of its version 4. This paper describes the screen content support and the five main low-level screen content coding tools in VVC: transform skip residual coding (TSRC), block-based differential pulse-code modulation (BDPCM), intra block copy (IBC), adaptive color transform (ACT), and the palette mode. The specification of these coding tools in the first version of VVC enables the VVC reference software implementation (VTM) to achieve average bit-rate savings of about 41% to 61% relative to the HEVC test model (HM) reference software implementation using the Main 10 profile for 4:2:0 screen content test sequences. Compared to the HM using the Screen-Extended Main 10 profile and the same 4:2:0 test sequences, the VTM provides about 19% to 25% bit-rate savings. The same comparison with 4:4:4 test sequences revealed bit-rate savings of about 13% to 27% for Y CBCR and of about 6% to 14% for R G B screen content. Relative to the HM without the HEVC version 4 screen content coding extensions, the bit-rate savings for 4:4:4 test sequences are about 33% to 64% for Y CBCR and 43% to 66% for R G B screen content.
A novel intra prediction algorithm is proposed to improve the coding performance of screen content for the emerging Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard. The algorithm, called In-Loop Residual coding with Scalar Quantization (ILR-SQ), employs in-block pixels as reference rather than the regular out-block ones. To this end, an additional in-loop residual signal is used to partially reconstruct the block at the pixel level, during the prediction. The proposed algorithm is essentially designed to target high detail textures, where deep block partitioning structure is required. Therefore, it is implemented to operate on 4 × 4 blocks only, where further block split is not allowed and the standard algorithm is still unable to properly predict the texture. Experiments in the Joint Exploration Model (JEM) reference software show that the proposed algorithm brings a BD-rate gain of 13% on synthetic content, with a negligible computational complexity overhead at both encoder and decoder sides.
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