YUV420 Conversion to RGB24

Vision4ce has accelerated its conversion and display capability for encoded video used in its DVR product - without using a high-end GPU.

Video streams from the Vision4ce DVR are encoded using the YUV420 planar standard - which needs to be converted to an RGB format for display using OpenGL or other windowing GUI. The CPU implementation running on the Intel Core2 Duo was found to be taking significant computational overhead at approx 8ms per (720x576) PAL frame. Whilst this is real-time, it can be a significant overhead when rendering multiple channels simultaneously.

In order to accelerate the process, the fragment shader hardware on the embedded Intel Graphics chipset was used to perform the conversion as part of the DVR display library. Whilst the embedded GPU is not as powerful as an NVidia GeForce GPU, the accelerated conversion process takes just over 1.5ms which represents an acceleration of around x5 and relieves the processing burden from the CPU.