Parallel Method for HEVC Deblocking Filter based on Coding Unit Depth Information

In this paper, we propose a parallel deblocking algorithm to resolve workload imbalance when the deblocking filter of high efficiency video coding (HEVC) decoder is parallelized. In HEVC, the deblocking filter which is one of the in-loop filters conducts two-step filtering on vertical edges first and horizontal edges later. The deblocking filtering can be conducted with high-speed through data-level parallelism because there is no dependency between adjacent edges for deblocking filtering processes. However, workloads would be imbalanced among regions even though the same amount of data for each region is allocated, which causes performance loss of decoder parallelization. In this paper, we solve the problem for workload imbalance by predicting the complexity of deblocking filtering with coding unit (CU) depth information at a coding tree block (CTB) and by allocating the same amount of workload to each core. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves average time saving (ATS) by 64.3%, compared to single core-based deblocking filtering and also achieves ATS by 6.7% on average and 13.5% on maximum, compared to the conventional uniform data-level parallelism.