Patent Application
20090154568
1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a multimedia decoding apparatus and method, more particularly to a multimedia decoding apparatus and method that can accelerate decoding speed.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the continued advancement in imaging techniques, sizes of images tend to become larger, resulting in a larger bandwidth requirement for transmitting image bit streams. To reduce the bandwidth required when transmitting image bit streams, many complicated image compression algorithms, such as MPEG1, MPEG2, H.264, etc., have been developed to increase the image compression rate while maintaining high quality image information. Accordingly, techniques for accelerating encoding or decoding have been proposed.
For current image decoding circuits, a high-speed data path is usually employed for computations to increase circuit efficiency. However, use of a high-speed data path for increasing the circuit efficiency complicates the circuit design.
Therefore, one object of the present invention is to provide a multimedia decoding apparatus that can accelerate decoding speed.
According to one aspect of the present invention, there is provided a multimedia decoding apparatus adapted for decoding a multimedia packet that includes a header portion and a data portion. The multimedia decoding apparatus comprises a header parsing module, a storage unit, and a data processing module. The header parsing module receives the multimedia packet and parses the header portion of the multimedia packet to output at least one parameter. The storage unit is coupled to the header parsing module for storing the at least one parameter and the data portion of the multimedia packet. The data processing module is coupled to the storage unit for processing the data portion of the multimedia packet according to the at least one parameter. When the data processing module processes the data portion of the multimedia packet, the header parsing module parses the header portion of another multimedia packet simultaneously.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a multimedia decoding method that can accelerate decoding speed.
According to another aspect of the present invention, there is provided a multimedia decoding method adapted for decoding a multimedia packet that includes a header portion and a data portion. The multimedia decoding method comprises the steps of: receiving the multimedia packet and parsing the header portion of the multimedia packet to output at least one parameter; storing the at least one parameter and the data portion of the multimedia packet in a storage unit; and processing the data portion of the multimedia packet according to the at least one parameter in the storage unit; wherein, when the data portion of the multimedia packet is being processed, the header portion of another multimedia packet is parsed simultaneously.
Other features and advantages of the present invention will become apparent in the following detailed description of the preferred embodiment with reference to the accompanying drawings, of which:
Referring to
In operation, the multimedia decoding apparatus 100 reads a multimedia packet (P1) from the memory 102, and parses the header portion of the multimedia packet (P1) through a header parsing unit 110 of the header parsing module 104. In this embodiment, the header parsing unit 110 parses the header portion of the multimedia packet (P1) to output a plurality of parsed parameters, such as a motion vector parameter, a boundary strength parameter, a weighting parameter, etc. Thereafter, the parsed parameters are packed or encoded through a parameter packing unit 112 of the header parsing module 104. The packed parameters are subsequently outputted for storage in the storage unit 106. In addition, the header parsing module 104 further stores the data portion of the multimedia packet (P1) in the storage unit 106. After the packed parameters and the data portion of the multimedia packet (P1) are stored in storage unit 106, the data processing module 108 retrieves a parsed multimedia packet (P1′), which includes a parameter portion and a data portion, from the storage unit 106 for decoding. In this embodiment, the data processing module 108 includes a parameter decoding unit 114 and a data processing unit 116 coupled to the parameter decoding unit 114. The data processing unit 116 is a decoding circuit used for performing decoding according to decoded parameters outputted from the parameter decoding unit 114. As an example, the parameter decoding unit 114 performs parameter decoding upon the parameter portion of the parsed multimedia packet (P1′) to output a motion vector to the data processing unit 116. Thereafter, the data processing unit 116 performs motion compensation computations according to the motion vector for accomplishing the decoding operation, and the decoded data are subsequently stored in the memory 102. It is noted that, since the storage unit 106 of the multimedia decoding apparatus 100 is a pipeline register, when the data processing module 108 processes the parsed multimedia packet (P1′), the header parsing module 104 can parse the header portion of another multimedia packet, such as the header portion of a multimedia packet (P2), simultaneously to achieve the effect of accelerating the decoding speed.
In this embodiment, the header parsing module 104 and the data processing module 108 of the multimedia decoding apparatus 100 are realized using a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) microprocessor and a hardware accelerator, respectively. Moreover, in addition to motion compensation, the data processing module 108 can be configured to perform other computations, such as entropy decoding, inverse quantization, inverse transformation, etc. Furthermore, the multimedia decoding apparatus 100 of this invention can be applied to any encoding/decoding application of multimedia and audio-visual data, such as MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG7, MPEG21, H.264, etc.
While the present invention has been described in connection with what is considered the most practical and preferred embodiment, it is understood that this invention is not limited to the disclosed embodiment but is intended to cover various arrangements included within the spirit and scope of the broadest interpretation so as to encompass all such modifications and equivalent arrangements.
