uAVS3d: Fast Decoder for the 3rd Generation Audio Video Coding Standard (AVS3)

Compared with AVS2 and HEVC, the compression performance of the 3rd generation audio video coding standard (AVS3) has been greatly improved. For the preliminary application of this emerging coding standard, an efficient implementation of software-based decoder is necessary before the decoding chips are widely used. However, real-time decoding of UHD streams is still a big challenge for AVS3 standard. In this paper, we proposed a fast decoder design for AVS3, consisting of framework optimization, data structure and module optimizations, SIMD optimization, and parallel decoding. On the one hand, a non-redundant and cache-friendly decoding framework is proposed. In this framework, data structure and some key modules are optimized. On the other hand, SIMD instructions and frame-level parallelism are applied to fully accelerate decoding on a general-purpose processor. We also implemented an efficient AVS3 decoder (uAVS3d) in this paper. Experimental results show that, when decoding streams with bit depths of 10 and 8 on the i7--7800x processor, uAVS3d is 4.2 and 6.3 times faster than the AVS3 reference software with single-thread, respectively. uAVS3d has a speed-up of 6.2x when decoding with 17 threads comparing with single-thread on this processor, and can decode UHD streams in real-time. Additionally, uAVS3d has a decoding speed of 33.8 fps with single-thread for 1080p video on Huawei P10. Thus, uAVS3d can be used in most existing video applications on PC and mobile terminal device.