High Throughput JPEG 2000 for Video Content Production and Delivery Over IP Networks

Abstract

ITU-T Rec T.814 | IS 15444-15, known as High Throughput JPEG 2000, or simply HTJ2K, is Part-15 in the JPEG 2000 series of standards, published in 2019 by the ITU and ISO/IEC. JPEG 2000 Part-1 has long been used as a key component in the production, archival and distribution of video content, as the distribution format for Digital Cinema, and an Interoperable Master Format from which streaming video services are commonly derived. JPEG 2000 has one of the richest feature sets of any coding standard, including scalability, region-of-interest accessibility and non-iterative optimal rate control. HTJ2K addresses a long-standing limitation of the original JPEG 2000 family of standards: relatively low throughput on CPU and GPU platforms. HTJ2K introduces an alternative block coding algorithm that allows extremely high processing throughputs, while preserving all other aspects of the JPEG 2000 framework and offering truly reversible transcoding with the original block coded representation. This paper demonstrates the benefits that HTJ2K brings to video content production and delivery, including cloud-based processing workflows and low latency video content streaming over IP networks, considering CPU, GPU and FPGA-based platforms. For non-iterative optimal rate control, HTJ2K encoders with the highest throughputs and lowest hardware encoding footprints need a strategy for constraining the number of so-called HT-Sets that are generated ahead of the classic Post-Compression Rate-Distortion optimization (PCRD-opt) process. This paper describes such a strategy, known as CPLEX, that involves a second (virtual) rate-control process. The novel combination of this virtual (CPLEX) and actual (PCRD-opt) processes has many benefits, especially for hardware encoders, where memory size and memory bandwidth are key indicators of complexity.