Title: A formal approach to H.264 video decoding on multicore systems

Authors: Kristian Lumme; Luigia Petre; Petter Sandvik; Kaisa Sere

Addresses: Department of Information Technologies, Åbo Akademi University, Joukahainengatan 3–5 A, 20520 Åbo, Finland ' Department of Information Technologies, Åbo Akademi University, Joukahainengatan 3–5 A, 20520 Åbo, Finland ' Department of Information Technologies, Åbo Akademi University, Joukahainengatan 3–5 A, 20520 Åbo, Finland ' Department of Information Technologies, Åbo Akademi University, Joukahainengatan 3–5 A, 20520 Åbo, Finland

Abstract: Multicore processing is quickly becoming ubiquitous, with more and more systems splitting the processing power between several processing cores instead of a single core. This approach is used not only to increase the total processing power and efficiency, but also to conserve energy. In this paper, we introduce a formal model created in Event-B of inter-frame dependencies in the H.264 video compression standard. Moreover, we formalise two parallelisation approaches for splitting the H.264 decoding process. The purpose of our modelling is to enable the adaptation of H.264 to multicore processing, as frames (or frame units called blocks) not depending on each other will be able to be decoded in parallel, on distinct cores. The formal proofs associated with the Event-B development of our model ensure the integrity of our proposal.

Keywords: video compression; H.264 video decoding; multicore processing; formal methods; Event-B; macroblock-level parallellisation; proving; refinement; RODIN tool; frame-level parallelisation; modelling.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCCBS.2013.053740

International Journal of Critical Computer-Based Systems, 2013 Vol.4 No.1, pp.3 - 26

Published online: 29 Apr 2014 *

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