Accelerating Transform Algorithm Implementation for Efficient Intra Coding of 8K UHD Videos

Abstract

Real-time ultra-high-definition (UHD) video applications have attracted much attention, where the encoder side urgently demands the high-throughput two-dimensional (2D) transform hardware implementation for the latest video coding standards. This article proposes an effective acceleration method for transform algorithm in UHD intra coding based on the third generation of audio video coding standard (AVS3). First, by conducting detailed statistical analysis, we devise an efficient hardware-friendly transform algorithm that can reduce running cycles and resource consumption remarkably. Second, to implement multiplierless computation for saving resources and power, a series of shift-and-add unit (SAU) hardwares are investigated to have much less adoptions of shifters and adders than the existing methods. Third, different types of hardware acceleration methods, including calculation pipelining, logical-loop unrolling, and module-level parallelism, are designed to efficaciously support the data-intensive high frame-rate 8K UHD video coding. Finally, due to the scarcity of 8K video sources, we also provide a new dataset for the performance verification. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can effectively fulfill the real-time 8K intra encoding at beyond 60 fps, with very negligible loss on rate-distortion (R-D) performance, which is averagely 0.98% Bjontegaard-Delta Bit-Rate (BD-BR).