Performance evaluation of all intra Kvazaar and x265 HEVC encoders on embedded system Nvidia Jetson platform

Abstract

The growing demand for high-quality video requires complex coding techniques that cost resource consumption and increase encoding time which represents a challenge for real-time processing on Embedded Systems. Kvazaar and x265 encoders are two efficient implementations of the High-Efficient Video Coding (HEVC) standard. In this paper, the performance of All Intra Kvazaar and x265 encoders on the Nvidia Jetson platform was evaluated using two coding configurations; highspeed preset and high-quality preset. In our work, we used two scenarios, first, the two encoders were run on the CPU, and based on the average encoding time Kvazaar proved to be 65.44% and 69.4% faster than x265 with 1.88% and 0.6% BD-rate improvement over x265 at high-speed and high-quality preset, respectively. In the second scenario, the two encoders were run on the GPU of the Nvidia Jetson, and the results show the average encoding time under each preset is reduced by half of the CPU-based scenario. In addition, Kvazaar is 54.5% and 56.70% faster with 1.93% and 0.45% BD-rate improvement over x265 at high-speed and high-quality preset, respectively. Regarding the scalability, the two encoders on the CPU are linearly scaled up to four threads and speed remains constant afterward. On the GPU, the two encoders are scaled linearly with the number of threads. The obtained results confirmed that, Kvazaar is more efficient and that it can be used on Embedded Systems for real-time video applications due to its high speed and performance over the x265 HEVC encoder