Optimization on H.264 De-blocking Filter

Sammanfattning: H.264/AVC is the state-of-the-art video coding standard which promises to achieve same video quality at about half the bit rate of previous standards (H.263, MPEG-2). This tremendous achievement in compression and perceptual quality is due to the inclusion of various innovative tools. These tools are highly complex and data intensive as a result poses very heavy computational burden on the processors. De-blocking filter is one among them, it is the most time consuming part of the H.264/AVC reference decoder. In this thesis, a performance analysis of the de-blocking filter is made on Intel Pentium 4 processor and accordingly various optimization techniques have been studied and implemented. For some techniques statistical analysis of video data is done and according to the results obtained optimization is performed and for other techniques SIMD instructions has been used to achieve the optimization. Comparison of optimized techniques using SIMD with the reference software has shown significant speedup thus contributing to the real time implementation of the de-blocking filter on general purpose platform.