Multithreading for video processing applications running on PC workstations

The aim of this paper is to show how an efficient exploitation of the multithreading technique can speed up video applications running on PC Workstations. We show how to use multithreading for pure processing in order to exploit the full computational power of multiprocessor machines. Different multithreading techniques are compared and the efficiency of multithreading is discussed. It is explained why multithreading can be a very helpful technique to avoid CPU idle state while reading and writing video to disk or displaying video on the screen. Disk reading is chosen as an example to give the gain that can be obtained using multithreading for input/output operations. Finally it is shown how multithreading can be used to take advantage of the external processing power available in graphic cards or acquisition boards. Indeed, very often in video processing applications, some routines can be done in hardware while another thread is running in parallel in order to keep the main CPU busy.