H.264/SVC decoder performance comparison for DSP-based consumer electronic applications

In this paper, a performance comparison of two H.264/SVC-compliant video decoders, Joint Scalable Video Model and Open SVC Decoder, is presented. The performance, in terms of time spent to decode a stream, has been compared in PC and Digital Signal Processor (DSP) environments. The performance of the Open SVC Decoder running on the PC is between three and eight times better than achieved with the JSVM decoder; while in the DSP environment, the improvement is between five and twelve times. These results show that the Open SVC Decoder is more suitable as starting point for the implementation of embedded applications based on DSP.