Luminance and Chrominance Parallelization of H.264/AVC Decoding on a Multi-core Processor

This paper proposes a novel method to optimizing H.264 decoding on multi-core processors by exploiting color component level parallelism. Compared with sequential decoding and macro-block level parallelism, the proposed method achieves optimal balance between performance and scalability. The optimization scheme is mapped on a 64-bit MIPS multi-core processor, and is evaluated with standard test streams. Experimental results show that the method improves video decoding performance by 2 times on average without increasing memory consumption, and could be easily applied on other multi-core processors.