Complexity Measurement and Fault Detection Techniques for H.264 Optimized Functions.

In this paper, we systematically studied the complexity measurement, SIMD (Single Input Multiple Data) fault types and testing methodologies for H.264 codec. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first attempt to address these problems. Firstly, two complexity metrics are calculated for various optimized functions in H.264 reference software. These measures have been found to be strongly correlated to the number of faults in software testing. Secondly, we introduced a new category of SIMD faults. Conformance testing, random testing and manual testing are proposed to deal with these SIMD faults as well as conventional faults. Results have shown that, conformance testing, often used as a mechanism to verify the conformity of a decoder under test (DUT), can also be used to discover faults in the studied optimized functions. Random testing is able to detect simple faults at both encoder and decoder functions. Manual testing is especially effective for difficult faults. In practice, one or more of the three techniques can be chosen as needed to increase fault detection rate and speed for H.264 video codec testing.