Abstract

The days of film are waning as digital cameras and digital video cameras are becoming commonplace. Uncompressed digital video can consume large amounts of space, making it cumbersome to store efficiently. A method of video compression was developed by the Motion Pictures Expert Group (MPEG), and is now an international standard with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). This thesis deals with the MPEG-2 Video standard, ISO/IEC 13818-2 [2]. The goal of this thesis is to explore the applications of MPEG-2 encoding in a parallel processing paradigm. To achieve this, a sequential MPEG-2 software encoder was obtained from the MPEG Software Simulation Group (MSSG) [18] and modified to be run, in parallel, on a cluster of single-processor Linux workstations using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) [11, 10, 3]. A multi-threaded pipeline of the encoding process was created using Pthreads [6]. The resulting pipelined parallel encoder has been shown to produce compliant elementary MPEG-2 bitstreams for progressive video sequences. Results of simulation showed that the parallel encoder always performed better than the sequential version as the number of processors scaled. However, it did not exhibit the ideal linear speedup that all parallel programs aim to achieve. This is due to the program executing on a set of resources not ideal for the multi-threaded pipeline. The ensuing chapters will provide the motivation for this work, and an overview of MPEG in addition to parallel processing and programming. Also forthcoming will be how it was achieved and the results produced. Supplementary applications of this work will also be discussed.

Library of Congress Subject Headings

MPEG (Video coding standard); Video compression--Standards; Image compression--Standards; Data compression (Computer science); Parallel processing (Electronic computers)

Publication Date

8-16-2002

Document Type

Thesis

Department, Program, or Center

Computer Engineering (KGCOE)

Advisor

Savakis, Andreas

Advisor/Committee Member

Hsu, Kenneth

Comments

Note: imported from RIT’s Digital Media Library running on DSpace to RIT Scholar Works. Physical copy available through RIT's The Wallace Library at: QA76.9.D33 Z466 2002

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

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