• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.503-518
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• 2012

In this paper, we propose a complexity-based parallelization method of the sample adaptive offset (SAO) algorithm which is one of HEVC in-loop filters. The SAO algorithm can be regarded as region-based process and the regions are obtained and represented with a quad-tree scheme. A offset to minimize a reconstruction error is sent for each partitioned region. The SAO of the HEVC can be parallelized in data-level. However, because the sizes and complexities of the SAO regions are not regular, workload imbalance occurs with multi-core platform. In this paper, we propose a LCU-based SAO algorithm and a complexity prediction algorithm for each LCU. With the proposed complexity-based LCU processing, we found that the proposed algorithm is faster than the sequential implementation by a factor of 2.38 times. In addition, the proposed algorithm is faster than regular parallel implementation SAO by 21%.