Skip to main content

Design and FPGA prototyping of a H.264/AVC main profile decoder for HDTV

Abstract

This paper presents the architecture, design, validation, and hardware prototyping of the main architectural blocks of main profile H.264/AVC decoder, namely the blocks: inverse transforms and quantization, intra prediction, motion compensation and deblocking filter, for a main profile H.264/AVC decoder. These architectures were designed to reach high throughputs and to be easily integrated with the other H.264/AVC modules. The architectures, all fully H.264/AVC compliant, were completely described in VHDL and further validated through simulations and FPGA prototyping. They were prototyped using a Digilent XUP V2P board, containing a Virtex-II Pro XC2VP30 Xilinx FPGA. The post place-and-route synthesis results indicate that the designed architectures are able to process 114 million samples per second and, in the worst case, they are able to process 64 HDTV frames (1080×1920) per second, allowing their use in H.264/AVC decoders targeting real time HDTV applications.

11. References

  1. Video Coding Experts Group. Advanced video coding for generic audiovisual services. ITU-T Recommendation H.264, International Telecommunication Union, Mar 2005.

  2. G. Sullivan, T. Wiegand. Video compression — from concepts to the H.264/AVC standard.Proceeding of the IEEE, 93(1):18-31, 2005.

  3. I. Richardson. H.264 and MPEG—4 video compression: Video coding for next—generation multimedia. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, 2003.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  4. Brazilian Communication Ministry. Brazilian digital TV system. http://sbtvd.cpqd.com.br, Mar. 2007.

  5. Video Coding Experts Group. Generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information — Part 2: Video. ITU-T Recommendation H.262, International Telecommunication Union, 1994.

  6. Motion Picture Experts Group. MPEG-4 Part 2: Coding of audio visual objects — Part 2: Visual. ISO/IEC Recommendation 14496–2, International Organization for Standardization, 1999.

  7. H. Malvar, A. Hallapuro, M. Karczewicz, L. Kerofsky. Low—complexity transform and quantization in H.264/AVC.IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 13(7):598–603, 2003.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. L. Agostini, M. Porto, J. Güntzel, R. Porto, S. Bampi. High throughput FPGA based architecture for H.264/AVC inverse transforms and quantization.In Proceedings of IEEE International Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems, San Juan, 2006.

  9. L. Agostini, R. Porto, J. Güntzel, I. Silva, S. Bampi High throughput multitransform and multiparallelism IP directed to the H.264/AVC video compression standard.In Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, Kós, pages 5419–5422, 2006.

  10. T. Wang, Y. Huang, H. Fang; L. Chen. Parallel 4x4 2D transform and inverse transform architecture for MPEG-4 AVC/H.264.In Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, Bangkok, pages 800-803, 2003.

  11. Z. Cheng, C. Chen, B. Liu, J. Yang. High throughput 2-D transform architectures for H.264 advanced video coders.In Proceedings of IEEE Asia-Pacific Conference on Circuits and Systems, Singapore, pages 1141–1144, 2004.

  12. K. Chen, J. Guo, J. Wang. An efficient direct 2-D transform coding IP design for MPEG-4 AVC/H.264.In Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, Kobe, pages 4517–4520, 2005.

  13. H. Lin, Y. Chao, C. Chen, B. Liu, J. Yang. Combined 2-D transform and quantization architectures for H.264 video coders.In Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, Kobe, pages 1802–1805, 2005.

  14. Y. Huang, B. Hsieh. Analysis, fast algorithm, and VLSI architecture design for H.264/AVC intra frame coder.IEEE Transactions on Circuits and System for Video Technology, 15(3): 378–401, 2005.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. W. Staehler, E. Berriel, A. Susin, S. Bampi. Architecture of an HDTV intraframe predictor for an H.264 decoder.In Proceedings of IFIP International Conference on Very Large Scale Integration, Perth, pages 228-233, 2006.

  16. X. Zhou, E. Li, Y. Chen. Implementation of H.264 decoder on general-purpose processors with media instructions.In Proceedings of SPIE Conference on Image and Video Communications and Processing, Santa Clara, pages 224–235, 2003.

  17. R. Wang, J. Li; C. Huang. Motion compensation memory access optimization strategies for H.264/AVC decoder.In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Philadelphia, volume 5, pages 97-100, 2005.

  18. A. Azevedo, B. Zatt, L. Agostini, S. Bampi. Motion compensation decoder architecture for H.264/AVC main profile targeting HDTV.In Proceedings of IFIP International Conference on Very Large Scale Integration, Perth, pages 52–57, 2006.

  19. S. Wang, T. Lin; T. Liu; C. Lee. A new motion compensation design for H.264/AVC decoder.In Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, Kobe, pages 4558–4561, 2005.

  20. R. Wang, M. Li; J. Li; Y. Zhang. High throughput and low memory access sub-pixel interpolation architecture for H.264/AVC HDTV decoder.IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, 51(3):1006–1013, 2005.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. W. Lie, H. Yeh; T. Lin, C. Chen. Hardware efficient computing architecture for motion compensation interpolation in H.264 video coding.In Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, Kobe, pages 2136–2139, 2005.

  22. H. Lin, J. Yang, B. Liu, J. Yang. Efficient deblocking filter architecture for H.264 video coders.In Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, Kós, pages 2617–2620, 2006.

  23. G. Khurana, A. Kassim, T. Chua, M. Mi. A pipelined hardware implementation of in-loop deblocking filter in H.264/AVC.IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, 52(2):536–540, 2006.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Mentor Graphics Corporation. ModelSim SE User’s Manual — Software Version 6.2d. http://www.model.com/resources/resources_manu als.asp, Mar. 2007.

  25. Xilinx Inc. Xilinx ISE 8.2i software manuals and help. http://www.xilinx.com/support/sw_manuals/ xilinx82/index.htm, Mar. 2007.

  26. Xilinx Inc. Virtex-II Pro and Virtex-II Pro X platform FPGAs: complete data sheet. http://direct.xilinx.com/bvdocs/publications/ds083 .pdf, Mar. 2007.

  27. Xilinx Inc. Xilinx university program Virtex-II Pro development system — hardware reference manual. http://direct.xilinx.com/bvdocs/ userguides/ug069.pdf, Mar. 2007.

  28. Xilinx Inc. Embedded system tools reference manual — embedded development Kit, EDK 8.2i. http://www.xilinx.com/ise/embedded/est_rm.pdf, Mar. 2007.

  29. L. Agostini, A. Azevedo, V. Rosa, E. Berriel, T. Santos, S. Bampi, A. Susin. Design of a H.264/AVC main profile decoder for HDTV.In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications, Madrid, pages 501-506, 2006.

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Agostini, L.V., Azevedo Filho, A.P., Staehler, W.T. et al. Design and FPGA prototyping of a H.264/AVC main profile decoder for HDTV. J Braz Comp Soc 13, 25–36 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03192399

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03192399

Keywords