CUDA-based H.264/AVC deblocking filtering

In H.264/AVC decoder, adaptive deblocking filter is one of the most complex modules and it takes 33% of the whole decoding process time. Its optimization, not only in algorithm level but also in code level, is a very important topic. In this paper, CUDA technology is proposed for speeduping the deblocking process. First, a frame is divided into 16×16 macroblocks and/or 4×4 subblocks. Second, edges of each block are highly parallelly filtered by SIMT(single instruction multiple thread) CUDA instructions. Comparison of the time consumption by processing a 640 × 480(4:2:0) video on CUDA and CPU is carried out. The proposed CUDA approach offers almost 15× improvement on the decoding efficiency.