A real-time wavelet-based video decoder using SIMD technology

This paper presents a fast implementation of a wavelet-based video codec. The codec consists of motion-compensated temporal filtering (MCTF), 2-D spatial wavelet transform, and SPIHT for wavelet coefficient coding. It offers compression efficiency that is competitive to H.264. The codec is implemented in software running on a general purpose PC, using C programming language and streaming SIMD extensions intrinsics, without assembly language. This high-level software implementation allows the codec to be portable to other general-purpose computing platforms. Testing with a Pentium 4 HT at 3.6GHz (running under Linux and using the GCC compiler, version 4), shows that the software decoder is able to decode 4CIF video in real-time, over 2 times faster than software written only in C language. This paper describes the structure of the codec, the fast algorithms chosen for the most computationally intensive elements in the codec, and the use of SIMD to implement these algorithms.