Optimizing mobile multimedia using SIMD techniques

Demand for mobile video applications is growing today in wireless handheld platforms. Optimizing instruction set architectures and employing SIMD techniques is a logical approach towards attaining higher performance in mobile multimedia applications. Intel? Wireless MMX™ technology has been designed to accelerate mobile multimedia and applications processing in a power efficient manner. This paper provides an overview of Intel? Wireless MMX™ technology, a 64-bit Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) coprocessor for the Intel? XScale? microarchitecture, and the key features of the architecture that specifically enhance the multi-media performance. Tools and techniques for optimization are also described. Nigel C. Paver has 13 years experience with the ARM architecture, and in the Intel PCA Components group in Austin, Texas, he is responsible for the architecture and implementation of multimedia coprocessors for the Intel XScale micro-architecture. He is also involved in product architecture and definition of Intel PCA processors. Before Intel, Nigel was one of the lead designers of the early AMULET asynchronous ARM microprocessors at the University of Manchester. He was also vice president in a startup company which used asynchronous design techniques to produce a low-power asynchronous DSP core. Nigel holds a Master of Science degree and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Manchester and a Bachelor of Science degree in electronics from UMIST. Moinul Khan is a multimedia product architect at Intel Corporation PCA Components group. He is responsible PCA graphics and security architecture. His research interests are virtual prototyping, signal processing algorithms and architecture and communications networking. Before joining Intel he was a technology specialist and founding member of a startup at ATDC, Georgia. He worked on his doctoral research at Georgia Center for Advanced Telecommunications Technology at Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his B.Tech form Indian Institute of Technology and MSEE from Georgia Tech. He also worked as a research member for Canadian Institute for Telecommunications Research and Bell Communications Laboratories. Bradley C. Aldrich joined Intel in 1997 where he is currently an architect within the PCA Components Group. His current work includes the development of coprocessor instruction support in addition to image capture and display technologies for XScale based application processors. He was previously a member of the Intel/Analog Devices joint development architecture team responsible for video enhancements for the Micro Signal Architecture. Prior to that he was a video system architect in Intel's Digital Imaging and Video Division working on CMOS sensors, still cameras, and tethered PC based video peripherals. He has also worked as a device engineer for Motorola and as a test engineer for Tektronix. He received a BSEE in 1988 and MSEE in 1994 from the University of Texas at San Antonio.     

Optimizing mobile multimedia using SIMD techniques

Demand for mobile video applications is growing today in wireless handheld platforms. Optimizing instruction set architectures and employing SIMD techniques is a logical approach towards attaining higher performance in mobile multimedia applications. Intel® Wireless MMX? technology has been designed to accelerate mobile multimedia and applications processing in a power efficient manner. This paper provides an overview of Intel® Wireless MMX? technology, a 64-bit Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) coprocessor for the Intel® XScale® microarchitecture, and the key features of the architecture that specifically enhance the multi-media performance. Tools and techniques for optimization are also described.     

A multilevel computing architecture for embedded multimedia applications

We have designed a new architecture that simplifies integration of heterogeneous IP for multimedia and streaming applications. The multilevel computing architecture (MLCA) is a template architecture featuring multiple processing units. This template architecture for SOC systems uses superscalar techniques to exploit task-level parallelism among different processing units. It supports a natural programming model that relieves programmers from explicitly synchronizing tasks and communicating data. code transformations that improve application performance are easy to incorporate in compilers for this architecture.     

Artificial intelligence in multimedia computing

Multimedia Tools and Applications -     

A user-centric network communication broker for multimedia collaborative computing

The development of collaborative multimedia applications today follows a vertical development approach, where each application is built on top of low-level network abstractions such as the socket interface. This stovepipe development process is a major inhibitor that drives up the cost of development and slows down the innovation pace of new generations of communication applications. In this paper, we propose a network communication broker (NCB) that provides a unified higher-level abstraction for the class of multimedia collaborative applications. We demonstrate how NCB encapsulates the complexity of network-level communication control and media delivery, and expedites the development of applications with various communication logics. We investigate the minimum necessary requirements for the NCB abstraction. We identify that the concept of user-level sessions involving multiple parties and multiple media, is critical to designing a reusable NCB to facilitate next-generation multimedia communications. Furthermore, the internal design of NCB decouples the user-level sessions from network-level sessions, so that the NCB framework can accommodate heterogeneous networks, and applications can be easily ported to new network environments. In addition, we demonstrate how the extensible and self-managing design of NCB supports dynamic adaptation in response to changes in network conditions and user requirements.     

Cognitive computing for intelligent multimedia systems

Multimedia Tools and Applications -     

A cost-effective cloud computing framework for accelerating multimedia communication simulations

Multimedia communication research and development often requires computationally intensive simulations in order to develop and investigate the performance of new optimization algorithms. Depending on the simulations, they may require even a few days to test an adequate set of conditions due to the complexity of the algorithms. The traditional approach to speed up this type of relatively small simulations, which require several develop–simulate–reconfigure cycles, is indeed to run them in parallel on a few computers and leaving them idle when developing the technique for the next simulation cycle. This work proposes a new cost-effective framework based on cloud computing for accelerating the development process, in which resources are obtained on demand and paid only for their actual usage. Issues are addressed both analytically and practically running actual test cases, i.e., simulations of video communications on a packet lossy network, using a commercial cloud computing service. A software framework has also been developed to simplify the management of the virtual machines in the cloud. Results show that it is economically convenient to use the considered cloud computing service, especially in terms of reduced development time and costs, with respect to a solution using dedicated computers, when the development time is longer than one hour. If more development time is needed between simulations, the economic advantage progressively reduces as the computational complexity of the simulation increases.     

A novel soft computing method for engine RUL prediction

Prognostics is an engineering discipline focused on predicting the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of a system or a component using raw multimedia (sensor) data. This paper presents a novel machine learning model for this task, which includes a smart ensemble of gradient boosted trees (GBT) and feed-forward neural networks. It incorporates discussions on the poor performance of MLPs and the need of ensemble models. Initial stages of data exploration and pre-processing are also comprehensively documented. Experiments are performed on the four run-to-failure C-MAPSS datasets defined by the 2008 PHM Data Challenge Competition. It concludes by presenting evaluations of multiple prediction models like MLP, SVR, CNN & gradient boosted trees (GBT). Gradient Boosted Trees are efficient in the sense that they produce an encouraging scoring model with minimum effort and also return feature importance information. The proposed method uses stacking ensemble of feed-forward neural networks and gradient boosted trees, as first level learner, and, a single-hidden layer- fully-connected neural network as the meta learner. This ensemble provides better results than any of the models alone or weighted average of their predictions. The proposed method outperforms MLP, SVR, CNN and GBT.

     

A novel model of adaptation decision-taking engine in multimedia adaptation

In heterogeneous environments, universal multimedia access (UMA) is proposed to provide multimedia content services. Multimedia adaptation is one of technologies to perform UMA, in which adaptation decision-taking engine (ADTE) is a key component. Though there are many models of ADTE existing, it needs to be reconsidered for personalized content services. In this paper, a novel model of ADTE is proposed based on decision tree termed adaptation decision tree (ADT) in which adaptation decision is viewed as sequence decision: modality decision and format decision. Correspondingly, user preferences are divided into two types: user modality preferences and user format preferences. By utilizing user preferences, the ADT model is built up. Before making decision, an optimal multimedia variation set (OMVS) with respect to user modality preferences is constructed and any element here is with the shortest distance to user format preferences for every modality. Therefore, adaptation decision can be executed by letting the element in OMVS travel along the ADT one by one. Finally, the first element that reaches the leaf with the logical value true is the decision result, or the one with the smallest value in distance is the decision variation if no elements get to proper leaf. Quantitative analysis and experimental simulation prove that the model is effective and efficient to cope with adaptation decision in multimedia adaptation especially in dynamic user preferences and resource-limited cases.     

Efficient multimedia coprocessor with enhanced SIMD engines for exploiting ILP and DLP

Multimedia applications have become increasingly important in daily computing. These applications are composed of heterogeneous regions of code mixed with data-level parallelism (DLP) and instruction-level parallelism (ILP). A standard solution for a multimedia coprocessor resembles of single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) engines into architectures exploiting ILP at compile time, such as very long instruction word (VLIW) and transport triggered architecture (TTA). However, the ILP regions fail to scale with the increased vector length to achieve high performance in the DLP regions. Furthermore, the register-to-register nature of SIMD instructions causes current SIMD engines to have limitations in handling memory alignment, data reorganization, and control flow. Many supporting instructions such as data permutations, address generations, and loop branches, are required to aid in the execution of the real SIMD computation instructions. To mitigate these problems, we propose optimized SIMD engines that have the capabilities for combining VLIW or TTA processing with a unified scalar and long vector computations as well as efficient SIMD hardware for real computation. Our new architecture is based on TTA and is called multimedia coprocessor (MCP). This architecture includes following features: (1) a simple coprocessor structure with 8-way TTA, (2) cost-effective SIMD hardware capable of performing floating-point operations, (3) long vector capabilities built upon existing SIMD hardware and a single register file and processor data path for both scalar operands and vector elements, and (4) an optimized SIMD architecture that addresses the SIMD limitations. Our experimental evaluations show that MCP can outperform conventional SIMD techniques by an average of 39% and 12% in performance for multimedia kernels and applications, respectively.     

SIMD architecture on FPGA for scientific computing aboard a space instrument

In this paper we propose a SIMD multiprocessor architecture to reach high performance in floating point operations by using FPGA devices. This architecture is used in an instrument that carries out the scientific analysis aboard the ESA's Solar Orbiter mission. We present a programming language and a compiler able to automatize the SIMD configuration process by using an initial sequential code. The proposed architecture squeezes the FPGA resources in order to reach the time constraints. The achieved FPGA system improves the ground-based system performance based on commercial CPUs regarding time and power consumption.     

面向体验质量的多媒体计算通信

随着移动互联网和通讯技术的发展,多媒体通信技术成为国家信息产业发展的重大需求,广泛地应用在视频会议、各类直播应用、远程医疗、远程监控和远程教育等方面。然而,大容量多媒体通信业务面临着网络带宽的压力。本文将媒体计算引入通信系统,建立新的多媒体通信研究范式,从提升体验质量（quality of experience,QoE）的角度,形成新的多媒体编码与传输方法,从根本上降低网络带宽需求的压力。体验质量即信息接收者结合自身期望对客观信息载体的有关性能给出的主观评价,是区别于服务质量（quality of service,QoS）的通信质量评价准则。本文介绍了QoE的评价准则,分为基于用户的评价方法和基于客观参数的评价方法,通过用户主观评分或对用户的相关生理、心理指标进行测量进而分析、推测用户的感受;或者通过对业务客观指标的主观化修正实现体验质量的评价。本文综述了多媒体编码方法,主要包括基于波形的编码和基于内容的编码方法。前者对任意视频信号进行有效编码而不需要分析视频内容,如一系列视频编码标准;后者识别视频序列中的物体和相关区域并对它们进行编码。本文阐述了5G+AI（artificial intelligence）时代的新型视频传输方法,如多视点视频编码、4 K、8 K视频编码,3D立体视频,点云、光场、AR（augmented reality）、VR（virtual reality）等视频业务。     

A parallel computing engine for a class of time critical processes

This paper focuses on the efficient parallel implementation of systems of numerically intensive nature over loosely coupled multiprocessor architectures. These analytical models are of significant importance to many real-time systems that have to meet severe time constants. A parallel computing engine (PCE) has been developed in this work for the efficient simplification and the near optimal scheduling of numerical models over the different cooperating processors of the parallel computer. First, the analytical system is efficiently coded in its general form. The model is then simplified by using any available information (e.g., constant parameters). A task graph representing the interconnections among the different components (or equations) is generated. The graph can then be compressed to control the computation/communication requirements. The task scheduler employs a graph-based iterative scheme, based on the simulated annealing algorithm, to map the vertices of the task graph onto a Multiple-Instruction-stream Multiple-Data-stream (MIMD) type of architecture. The algorithm uses a nonanalytical cost function that properly considers the computation capability of the processors, the network topology, the communication time, and congestion possibilities. Moreover, the proposed technique is simple, flexible, and computationally viable. The efficiency of the algorithm is demonstrated by two case studies with good results.     

Towards a multimedia World-Wide Web information retrieval engine

Search engines are useful because they allow the user to find information of interest from the World-Wide Web. However, most of the popular search engines today are textual; they do not allow the user to find images from the Web. This paper describes a search engine that integrates text and image search. One or more Web sites can be indexed for both textual and image information, allowing the user to search based on keywords or images or both. Another problem with the current search engines is that they show the results as pages of scrolled list; this is not very user-friendly. Therefore our search engine allows the user to visualize the results in various ways. This paper explains the indexing and searching techniques of the search engine and highlights several features of the querying interface to make the retrieval process more efficient. Examples are used to show the usefulness of the technology.     

Data compression in multimedia computing — standards and systems

Note. There are several ways to order the mentioned Standards of ISO. In the US, for example, one may call ANSI (212-642-4900) or Global Engineering Documents, Washington, DC (800-854-7179)