TITLE:
System-on-a-Chip (SoC) Based Hardware Acceleration for Video Codec
AUTHORS:
Xinwei Niu, Jeffrey Fan
KEYWORDS:
SoC; Software Profiling; Hardware Acceleration; Video Codec
JOURNAL NAME:
Optics and Photonics Journal,
Vol.3 No.2B,
July
18,
2013
ABSTRACT: Nowadays, from home monitoring to large airport
security, a lot of digital video surveillance systems have been used. Digital
surveillance system usually requires streaming video processing abilities. As
an advanced video coding method, H.264 is introduced to reduce the large video
data dramatically (usually by 70X or more). However, computational overhead
occurs when coding and decoding H.264 video. In this paper, a System-on-a-Chip
(SoC) based hardware acceleration solution for video codec is proposed, which
can also be used for other software applications. The characteristics of the
video codec are analyzed by using the profiling tool. The Hadamard function,
which is the bottleneck of H.264, is identified not only by execution time but
also another two attributes, such as cycle per loop and loop round. The
Co-processor approach is applied to accelerate the Hadamard function by
transforming it to hardware. Performance improvement, resource costs and energy
consumption are compared and analyzed. Experimental results indicate that 76.5%
energy deduction and 8.09X speedup can be reached after balancing these three
key factors.