Parallel Streaming Intra Prediction for Full HD H.264 Encoding

Intra prediction is the most important intensive computing component in H.264 intra frame coder. Its high computational costs give huge pressure to most current embedded programmable processors, especially in real-time HD H.264 video encoding. Stream processing model, an emerging parallel processing model supported by GPUs and most programmable processors, bridges the gap between flexible programmable processors and high-performance special-purpose processors. This paper presents parallel streaming intra prediction on programmable processors. Two methods of 7-steps block parallel and macro block parallel are designed to deal with the restrictions of parallel. Experiment results of full HD H.264 encoding show that our parallel streaming intra prediction methods accomplish obvious speedup (more than 5 times) on different programmable processors. Moreover, the entire streaming H.264 encoder with our parallel intra prediction method achieves real-time performance for encoding full HD H.264 video sequence.