A Very High Throughput Deblocking Filter for H.264/AVC

Abstract

This paper presents a novel hardware architecture for the real-time high-throughput implementation of the adaptive deblocking filtering process specified by the H.264/AVC video coding standard. A parallel filtering order of six units is proposed according to the H.264/AVC standard. With a parallel filtering order (fully compliant with H.264/AVC) and a dedicated data arrangement in local memory banks, the proposed architecture can process filtering operations for one macroblock with less filtering cycles than previously proposed approaches. Whereas, filtering efficiency is improved due to a novel computation scheduling and a dedicated architecture composed of six filtering cores. It can be used either into the decoder or the encoder as a hardware accelerator for the processor or can be embedded into a full-hardware codec. This developed Intellectual Property block-based on the proposed architecture supports multiple and high definition processing flows in real time. While working at clock frequency of 150 MHz, synthesized under 65 nm low power and low voltage CMOS standard cell technology, it easily meets the throughput requirements for 4 k video at 30 fps of all the levels in H.264/AVC video coding standard and consumes 25.08 Kgates.