This paper presents an efficient hardware architecture for real-time implementation of adaptive deblocking filter algorithm used in H.264 video coding standard. This hardware is designed to be used as part of a complete H.264 video coding system for portable applications. We use a novel edge filter ordering in a Macroblock to prevent the deblocking filter hardware from unnecessarily waiting for the pixels that will be filtered become available. The proposed architecture is implemented in Verilog HDL. The Verilog RTL code is verified to work at 72 MHz in a Xilinx Virtex II FPGA. The FPGA implementation can code 30 CIF frames (352x288) per second.
In this paper, we propose pixel equality and pixel similarity based techniques for reducing the amount of computations performed by H.264 Deblocking Filter (DBF) algorithm, and therefore reducing the energy consumption of H.264 DBF hardware. These techniques avoid unnecessary calculations in H.264 DBF algorithm by exploiting the equality and similarity of the pixels used in DBF equations. The proposed techniques reduce the amount of addition and shift operations performed by H.264 DBF algorithm up to 52% and 67% respectively with a small comparison overhead. The pixel equality based technique does not affect PSNR. The pixel similarity based technique does not affect the PSNR for some video frames, but it decreases the PSNR slightly for some video frames. We also implemented an efficient H.264 DBF hardware including the proposed techniques using Verilog HDL. The proposed pixel equality and pixel similarity based techniques reduced the energy consumption of this H.264 DBF hardware up to 35% and 39%, respectively. Therefore, they can be used in portable consumer electronics products that require real-time video compression. 1
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.