VLSI Architectures of a Wiener Filter for Video Coding

Walid Walid,Massimo Ruo Roch,Guido Masera,Giorgio Armanno,Maurizio Martina,Sandro Di Paola

doi:10.3390/electronics10161961

Abstract

In the modern age, the use of video has become fundamental in communication and this has led to its use through an increasing number of devices. The higher resolution required for images and videos leads to more memory space and more efficient data compression, obtained by improving video coding techniques. For this reason, the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) developed a new open-source and royalty-free codec, named AOMedia Video 1 (AV1). This work focuses on the Wiener filter, a specific loop restoration tool of the AV1 video coding format, which features a significant amount of computational complexity. A new hardware architecture implementing the separable symmetric normalized Wiener filter is presented. Furthermore, the paper details possible optimizations starting from the basic architecture. These optimizations allow the Wiener filter to achieve a 100× reduction in processing time, compared to existing works, and 5× improvement in megasamples per second.

Highlights

In the last years, the need for an open media codec has increased with the growth of internet video contents since the triumph of the internet is founded on the fact that the basic technologies are open and available to be freely implemented
Mozilla, Google and Cisco, with Amazon and Netflix and some hardware vendors like AMD and Intel, founded Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) in 2015 that, in 2018, published the first version of AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) [1,2], a video codec largely based on VP9 [3]
The basic idea was to start from the analysis of the entire AV1 codec and focus on a particular part based on the “profiling” results of the AV1 Software model [5] to understand the usage percentage of each one and evaluate which one needed more attention

Summary

Introduction

The need for an open media codec has increased with the growth of internet video contents since the triumph of the internet is founded on the fact that the basic technologies (such as browsers, operating system, etc.) are open and available to be freely implemented. Combining these needs led several big companies to create some alternatives to codecs with complex and expensive royalties. It is used in other application including speech processing, noise reduction, deblurring, etc. [11,12,13,14]

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Conclusion