A case for FPGA-based accelerators for energy-efficient motion picture video processing
Citation:
Boyle, Jason and Shanker, Shreejith, A case for FPGA-based accelerators for energy-efficient motion picture video processing, Applications of Digital Image Processing XLVI, San Diego, August, 2023, SPIE, SPIE, 2023Abstract:
In recent years, computing-based video processing workflows have become an integral part of the motion picture
industry. These workloads are highly data- and compute-intensive, requiring capable hardware to achieve the
required performance. Currently, general-purpose CPUs and GPUs are used to accelerate video processing
functions in motion picture workflows. While such devices are highly suited to software-driven video processing
workflows, they consume large amounts of energy in these tasks. In this work, we present a case for deploying an
FPGA-based accelerator as an energy-efficient alternative to general-purpose hardware in high-resolution motion
picture video processing, using an ingest module as a case study. We show that an FPGA-based accelerator
for decoding 8K OpenEXR B44 video frames, designed using a commercial high-level synthesis workflow and
executing on a PCIe-connected Alveo U50 device, outperforms a highly parallel, CPU-optimised inbuilt B44
decoder implementation in terms of energy consumption per frame decoded. In our experiments, the FPGAaccelerated B44 was able to decode 8K frames with 47.9 ms latency while consuming 0.98 J of energy per frame,
compared to the 58.3 ms achieved by a high-end Intel 11700-K CPU while consuming 4.5 J per frame, when
averaged over 1000 runs. We further show that this offload can be seamlessly integrated into state-of-the-art
motion picture tools such as NUKE with minimal effort. With FPGAs becoming mainstream in cloud servers,
we envision that this work paves the way for more efficient integration and utilisation of custom hardware and
FPGAs in compute-intensive motion picture workflows.
Author's Homepage:
http://people.tcd.ie/shankers
Author: Shanker, Shreejith
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Applications of Digital Image Processing XLVIPublisher:
SPIEType of material:
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