REAL-TIME IMPLEMENTATION OF SCALABLE HEVC ENCODER

This paper presents the first known open-source Scalable HEVC (SHVC) encoder for real-time applications. Our proposal is built on top of Kvazaar HEVC encoder by extending its functionality with spatial and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) scalable coding schemes. These two scalability schemes have been optimized for real-time coding by means of three parallelization techniques: 1) wavefront parallel processing (WPP); 2) overlapped wavefront (OWF); and 3) AVX2-optimized upsampling. On an 8-core Xeon W-2145 processor, the proposed spatially scalable Kvazaar can encode two-layer 1080p video above 50 fps with scaling ratios of 1.5 and 2. The respective coding gains are 18.4% and 9.9% over Kvazaar simulcast coding at similar speed. Correspondingly, the coding speed of SNR scalable Kvazaar exceeds 30 fps with two-layer 1080p video. On average, it obtains 1.20 times speedup and 17.0% better coding efficiency over the simulcast case. These results justify the benefits of the proposed scalability schemes in real-time SHVC coding.