Hardware/software co-design of H.264/AVC encoders for multi-core embedded systems

This paper presents a multi-core H.264/AVC encoder suitable for implementations in small and medium complexity embedded systems. The proposed structure results from an efficient hardware/software co-design methodology, where the encoder software application is highly optimized and structured in a ve...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Dias, Tiago (author)
Other Authors: Roma, Nuno (author), Sousa, Leonel (author)
Format: conferenceObject
Language:eng
Published: 2020
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10400.21/12300
Country:Portugal
Oai:oai:repositorio.ipl.pt:10400.21/12300
Description
Summary:This paper presents a multi-core H.264/AVC encoder suitable for implementations in small and medium complexity embedded systems. The proposed structure results from an efficient hardware/software co-design methodology, where the encoder software application is highly optimized and structured in a very modular and efficient manner, so as to allow its most complex and time consuming operations to be offloaded to dedicated hardware accelerators. The considered methodology adopts a simple and efficient core interconnection mechanism to easily allow the inclusion and the removal of such optimized processing cores. Experimental results obtained with the implementation in a Virtex4 FPGA of an H.264/AVC encoder using an ASIP IP core as a ME hardware accelerator have proven the advantages of this methodology. For the considered system, speedup factors greater than 15 were obtained with a very modest increase of the involved hardware resources.