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Scalable Unified Transform Architecture for Advanced Video Coding Embedded Systems

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Abstract

A novel high throughput and scalable unified architecture for the computation of the transform operations in video codecs for advanced standards is presented in this paper. This structure can be used as a hardware accelerator in modern embedded systems to efficiently compute all the two-dimensional 4 × 4 and 2 × 2 transforms of the H.264/AVC standard. Moreover, its highly flexible design and hardware efficiency allows it to be easily scaled in terms of performance and hardware cost to meet the specific requirements of any given video coding application. Experimental results obtained using a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA demonstrated the superior performance and hardware efficiency levels provided by the proposed structure, which presents a throughput per unit of area relatively higher than other similar recently published designs targeting the H.264/AVC standard. Such results also showed that, when integrated in a multi-core embedded system, this architecture provides speedup factors of about 120× concerning pure software implementations of the transform algorithms, therefore allowing the computation, in real-time, of all the above mentioned transforms for Ultra High Definition Video (UHDV) sequences (4,320 × 7,680 @ 30 fps).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ISEL-PI Lisbon/INESC-ID Lisbon/IST-TU Lisbon, Rua Conselheiro Emídio Navarro 1, 1959-007, Lisbon, Portugal

    Tiago Dias

  2. IUMA/University of Las Palmas GC, Campus Universitario de Tafira, 35017, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain

    Sebastián López

  3. INESC-ID Lisbon/IST-TU Lisbon, Rua Alves Redol 9, 1000-029, Lisbon, Portugal

    Nuno Roma & Leonel Sousa

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  1. Tiago Dias
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  2. Sebastián López
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  3. Nuno Roma
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  4. Leonel Sousa
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Correspondence to Tiago Dias.

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Dias, T., López, S., Roma, N. et al. Scalable Unified Transform Architecture for Advanced Video Coding Embedded Systems. Int J Parallel Prog 41, 236–260 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10766-012-0221-x

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