Extend the FFmpeg Framework to Analyze Media Content

Abstract: This paper introduces a new set of video analytics plugins developed for the FFmpeg framework. Multimedia applications that increasingly utilize the FFmpeg media features for its comprehensive media encoding, decoding, muxing, and demuxing capabilities can now additionally analyze the video content based on AI models. The plugins are thread optimized for best performance overcoming certain FFmpeg threading limitations. The plugins utilize the Intel OpenVINO Toolkit inference engine as the backend. The analytics workloads are accelerated on different platforms such as CPU, GPU, FPGA or specialized analytics accelerators. With our reference implementation, the feature of OpenVINO as inference backend has been pushed into FFmpeg mainstream repository. We plan to submit more patches later.