Efficient In-Loop Filtering Across Tile Boundaries for Multi-Core HEVC Hardware Decoders With 4 K/8 K-UHD Video Applications

HEVC is a next generation video coding standard designed with modern coding techniques to be especially efficient for coding high-resolution video such as 4 K/8 K-ultra high- definition (UHD) video. Among the advanced coding tools of HEVC, tiles and wavefront parallel processing (WPP) have been newly adopted for parallel processing of such high-resolution (4 K/8 K-UHD) video. To realize UHD video services over portable devices with limited battery power, it is essential to implement multi-core-based and dedicated HEVC hardware decoders that support the tile- and wavefront-based parallel processing. By doing so, each frame is divided into a multiple number of picture partitions which can then be processed by multiple hardware decoder cores in parallel. However, in-loop filtering (ILF) at tile boundaries cannot be easily parallelized by a multi-core HEVC hardware decoder because of the data dependency between samples in different tiles. In this paper, an efficient control method for ILF across tile boundaries is proposed for multi-core HEVC hardware decoders. The proposed method does not require additional in-loop filters for ILF across the tile boundaries and it allows a decoder core to continue to process the next coding tree unit (CTU) without waiting for other decoders until they finish their ILF processing for the neighboring CTUs in other tiles. From experiments, we show the effectiveness of our ILF control method via a quad-core HEVC decoder for 4 K-UHD video implemented on a prototyping FPGA board.