4K Real Time Software Solution of Scalable HEVC for Broadcast Video Application

Scalable high-efficiency video coding (SHVC) is the scalable extension of the high-efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard. SHVC enables spatial, quality, bit-depth, color gamut, and codec scalability. The architecture of the SHVC encoder is based on multiple instances of the HEVC encoder where each instance encodes one video layer. This architecture offers several advantages of being modular and close to the native HEVC coding block scheme. However, the close-loop SHVC architecture requires the complete decoding of the reference lower layer frames to decode a higher quality layer, which considerably increases the complexity of both encoder and decoder processes. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end 4K real-time SHVC solution, including both software encoder and decoder, for video broadcast applications. The SHVC codec relies on low-level optimizations for specific Intel x86 platform and parallel processing to speed up the encoding and decoding processes. The proposed encoder enables real-time processing of 4Kp30 video in 2x spatial scalabilities on the 4 x 10 cores Intel Xeon processor (E5-4627V3) running at 2.6 GHz. In addition, the SHVC decoder enables to decode, respectively, the lower quality layer in full HD (1920 x 1080p30) resolution, an advanced RISC machine (ARM) Neon mobile platform, and the enhancement layer in UHD (3840 x 2160p30), on a fitted laptop, with 4 cores Intel i7 processor running at 2.7 GHz. Finally, experimental results have shown that the proposed solution can reach a high rate-distortion performance close to the reference SHVC reference software model (SHM) with a speedup of 37 and 66 in intra and inter coding configurations.