Highly parallel image coding for many cores

This paper proposes a pure line-by-line image coding scheme (LBC) for many-core computers. The proposed scheme can simultaneously use tens and even hundreds of cores to compress one HD image. In LBC, an input image is coded line by line sequentially and each line is divided into many short segments at equal length that are coded independently. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can speed the encoding up to 14 times through 16 cores, whereas parallel H.264 intra-frame coding can only speed up less than 5 times. In terms of coding performance, efficient intra predictions are proposed to make full use of the strong correlations among neighboring lines. Experiments results also show that the proposed scheme can have a comparable and even better performance than H.264 high profile at middle bit rates. At high bit rates, the proposed scheme can outperform H.264 high profile more than 10dB.