Slice-based parallel approach for HEVC encoder

The high efficiency video coding (HEVC) is the newest video coding standard from the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group and the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group, which significantly increases the computing demands to encode video to reach the limits on compression efficiency. Our interest is centered on applying parallel processing techniques to HEVC encoder to significantly reduce the computational time without disturbing the coding performance behavior. We propose a parallelization approach to the HEVC encoder which is well suited to multicore architectures. Our proposal uses OpenMP programming paradigm working at slice parallelization level. We encode several slices of each frame at the same time using all available processing cores. The results show that speed-ups up to 9.8 can be obtained for the All Intra mode and up to 8.7 for Low-Delay B, Low-Delay P and Random Access modes for 12 processes with a negligible loss in coding performance.