In this paper, a novel method to accelerate the spatial resolution downscaling transcoding operation for high efficiency video coding (HEVC) is proposed. The proposed transcoder first extracts the information about the coding unit (CU) structure during the decoding process and analyzes it to construct a pseudo-quadtree of the target resolution. By utilizing the constructed pseudo-quadtree, the encoder process is accelerated by searching only the optimal depth in the quadtree structure. To evaluate the performance of the proposed transcoding method, its transcoding time and bitrate loss are measured and compared with those of the HEVC reference encoder and decoder. Also, a comparison with state-of-the-art fast CU size decision methods and spatial resolution downscaling transcoding methods for HEVC is presented. The proposed method achieves an average speedup of 1.65 with an average bitrate loss of 2.06%.

Since the computer vision technologies are used to extract features from the edges of images, the median filter is frequently used as a pre-processing operation to improve the quality of feature objects. However, the median filter algorithms still have the limitation on integrating with the mobile systems due to the large computation overhead. Since the median filter accounts for a large proportion of total computation, this paper proposes a separable median filter to resolve the limitation. The proposed separable median filter is implemented with the sorting network, and reuses the data sorted at neighbor pixels, reducing duplicated comparisons.

The demand for real-time processing of robust feature detection is one of the major issues in the computer vision field. In order to comply with the requirements, in this paper a parallelization and optimization method to effectively accelerate SURF is proposed. The proposed parallelization method is developed based on a workload analysis of SURF in terms of various aspects, focusing in particular on the load balancing problem. First, the average parallel workload is divided into identical portions using the vertical partitioning method. Then, the load imbalance problem is further resolved using the dynamic partition balancing method. In addition, an optimization method is proposed together with the parallelization method to find and exclude redundant operations in SURF, thus effectively accelerating the feature detection operation when the proposed parallelization method is applied. The proposed method shows a maximum speedup of 19.21 compared to the single threaded performance on a 24-core system, achieving a maximum of 83.80 fps in a real-machine experiment, enabling real-time processing.