Using GPU-Accelerated Pixel Format Conversions for Efficient Real-Time Video Streaming

Pixelweave Chromascale is a new open-source library that can leverage GPU computing to efficiently convert video frame pixel formats. The library enhances the computational performance of high-quality real-time video streaming by accelerating pre-frame conversions and offloading resource-intensive tasks from the CPU. It currently supports a wide range of pixel formats, including RGBA and chroma-subsampled YUV, using up to 16 bits per color channel. It is accessed through a C++ interface that triggers a GPU compute pipeline. It uses a novel approach that samples $2 \times 2$ pixel windows, ensuring the code is easily extensible and independent of source and destination formats. Evaluations of multiple video samples demonstrate significant improvement in frames-per-second when compared to existing state-of-the-art CPU-based libraries and show improved video quality in real-time streaming applications. Pixelweave technology has been integrated into a production tool to create numerous award-winning films, enabling more performant and color-accurate real-time streaming.