HARDWARE FRIENDLY FIXED-POINT APPROXIMATIONS OF VIDEO QUALITY METRICS
A scalable hardware accelerator configured to compute video quality metrics is disclosed. In some embodiments, an accelerator for video quality metrics comprises an application-specific integrated circuit that includes an interface configured to receive pixel data of a frame of a video being analyzed for quality metric determination and a kernel configured to compute a video quality metric for the received pixel data using a fixed-point hardware approximation of a floating-point based algorithm associated with the video quality metric.
1 . A system, comprising:
an interface of an application-specific integrated circuit configured to receive pixel data of a frame of a video being analyzed for quality metric determination; and
a kernel of the application-specific integrated circuit configured to compute a video quality metric for the received pixel data using a fixed-point hardware approximation of a floating-point based algorithm associated with the video quality metric.
2 . The system of claim 1 , wherein the fixed-point hardware approximation comprises an approximation of a non-linear function.
3 . The system of claim 2 , wherein the approximation of the non-linear function comprises a piecewise linear function.
4 . The system of claim 3 , wherein the piecewise linear function is uniformly or non-uniformly sampled.
5 . The system of claim 2 , wherein the approximation of the non-linear function comprises a k-th order polynomial.
6 . The system of claim 1 , wherein the fixed-point hardware approximation comprises an approximation of a logarithmic function.
7 . The system of claim 6 , wherein an input argument of the approximation of the logarithmic function is scaled to a value comprising a prescribed range.
8 . The system of claim 6 , wherein the approximation of the logarithmic function comprises a piecewise linear function with more segments in a region closer to an input argument having a value of one than a region closer to a value of two.
9 . The system of claim 1 , wherein the fixed-point hardware approximation preserves numerical stability of the algorithm by using corresponding thresholds for one or more associated parameters of the algorithm.
10 . The system of claim 1 , wherein the fixed-point hardware approximation replaces a negative value of a parameter of the algorithm with a non-negative value, wherein the parameter has a mathematical property of being non-negative.
11 . The system of claim 10 , wherein the non-negative value is zero.
12 . The system of claim 1 , wherein the video quality metric comprises a no reference metric or a full reference metric.
13 . The system of claim 1 , wherein the video quality metric comprises a perception-based video quality metric.
14 . The system of claim 13 , wherein the perception-based video quality metric comprises one or more of: Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM), Multi-Scale SSIM (MS-SSIM), Visual Information Fidelity (VIF), Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion (VMAF), and Detail Loss Metric (DLM).
15 . A method, comprising:
configuring an interface of an application-specific integrated circuit to receive pixel data of a frame of a video being analyzed for quality metric determination; and
configuring a kernel of the application-specific integrated circuit to compute a video quality metric for the received pixel data using a fixed-point hardware approximation of a floating-point based algorithm associated with the video quality metric.
16 . The method of claim 15 , wherein the fixed-point hardware approximation comprises an approximation of a non-linear function.
17 . The method of claim 15 , wherein the fixed-point hardware approximation preserves numerical stability of the algorithm by using corresponding thresholds for one or more associated parameters of the algorithm.
18 . A computer program product embodied in a non-transitory computer readable medium and comprising computer instructions for:
configuring an interface of an application-specific integrated circuit to receive pixel data of a frame of a video being analyzed for quality metric determination; and
configuring a kernel of the application-specific integrated circuit to compute a video quality metric for the received pixel data using a fixed-point hardware approximation of a floating-point based algorithm associated with the video quality metric.
19 . The computer program product of claim 18 , wherein the fixed-point hardware approximation comprises an approximation of a non-linear function.
20 . The computer program product of claim 18 , wherein the fixed-point hardware approximation preserves numerical stability of the algorithm by using corresponding thresholds for one or more associated parameters of the algorithm.