Parallel Deblocking Filter Based on Modified Order of Accessing the Coding Tree Units for HEVC on Multicore Processor

The deblocking filter (DF) reduces blocking artifacts in encoded video sequences, and thereby significantly improves the subjective and objective quality of videos. Statistics show that the DF accounts for 5-18% of the total decoding time in high-efficiency video coding. Therefore, speeding up the DF will improve codec performance, especially for the decoder. In view of the rapid development of multicore technology, we propose a parallel DF scheme based on a modified order of accessing the coding tree units (CTUs) by analyzing the data dependencies between adjacent CTUs. This enables the DF to run in parallel, providing accelerated performance and more flexibility in the degree of parallelism, as well as finer parallel granularity. We additionally solve the problems of variable privatization and thread synchronization in the parallelization of the DF. Finally, the DF module is parallelized based on the HM16.1 reference software using OpenMP technology. The acceleration performance is experimentally tested under various numbers of cores, and the results show that the proposed scheme is very effective at speeding up the DF.