Memory and architectural optimizations for soft video encoders

This paper presents a set of platform-independent architectural optimizations for improving the performance of software-based standard video coders. These denote changes that affect the underlying memory model and physical architecture of the encoder with an objective of achieving maximum encoder performance with respect to execution time and memory usage. The coding quality does not suffer due to these modifications because the algorithm itself is not changed. An interface driven methodology has been developed to identify and ameliorate performance bottlenecks for any encoder. Appropriate data flow between components has been proposed so that memory intensive operations including memory accesses and copying are minimized. The proposed methods have been applied to an MPEG4 reference implementation to demonstrate the computational improvements achieved while avoiding any algorithmic modifications. These techniques have been shown to result in improvements in the range of 15–50% in the overall encoding time of a video codec on a general-purpose computing platform. The resulting implementation is also shown to be faster than some well-known open source solutions.