White Paper
In this paper we present an implementation of an H.264 video encoding algorithm on a Cell Broadband Engine (CBE), for the application of high-quality video surveillance. The proposed system aims to encode three channels of a standarddefinition (720 × 480) video stream at 30 frames per second with a target bit-rate of 2 Mbps. The presented encoder is compliant with the main-profile of the H.264 standard, and uses a learning-theoretic mode selection algorithm as an alternative to brute-force rate-distortion optimized mode selection, enabling significantly reduced computational complexity. The CBE offers an aggregate of 204.8 GFlops of computing power, at 3.2 GHz, in 8 Synergistic Processor Elements (SPEs), each with 128-bit wide vector processing capability. The SPEs are under the control of a central Power Processor Element (PPE) which has its own 128-bit vector processing unit and all units are connected by an on-chip broadband bus with 25.6 GB/s bandwidth capacity and an I/O bus providing 50 GB/s. This combination of processing units and high-speed internal buses is ideally suited for the target application of multi-channel real-time H.264 video encoding. The proposed system employed only the standard tools provided with the CBE toolkit, without resorting to customized assembly level programming.

Revision Date: 10/31/05

Link	File type	Size
H.264 Video Encoding Algorithm on Cell Broadband Engine	PDF	89KB