A Multilevel Parallel Intra Coding for H.264/AVC Based on CUDA

In this paper, we propose a multilevel parallel intra coding for H.264/AVC based on computed unified device architecture (CUDA). The proposed parallel algorithm improves the parallelism between 4x4 blocks within a macro block (MB) by throwing off some inappreciable prediction modes. By partitioning a frame into multi-slice, the parallelism between MBs can be exploited. In addition, a scalable parallel method for kernels is introduced to improve the performance of the proposed intra coding. Experimental results show that, more than 20 times speedup can be achieved with the assistance of GPU. Moreover, the entire encoder can meet the real-time processing requirement for HDTV.