Design of anMC Interpolation Architecture for H.264 Video Decoder

Abstract

H.264/AVC is the newest video coding standard. Compared with MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and H.263, H.264/AVC provides highest coding efficiency and better video quality. Motion compensation is one of the techniques for enhancement video quality in video decoder standard that includes 6-tap FIR filter and 1/4-pel precision for luminance and 1/8-pel precision for chrominance. In H.264/AVC decoder, the motion compensation consumed 39% decoding time, which is the most important influence of decoding system because of its complex computation. For this reason, in this paper, we proposed an efficient motion compensation interpolation architecture for reducing computational complexity in H.264/AVC decoder. Since the luminance computation occupies 80% of the whole motion compensation interpolation computation, consequently, we propose two algorithms to reduce the computational complexity for luminance component — the 6-tap Mean Filter, which applies 6-tap FIR filter method and Mean concept, and the 4-tap Mean Filter, which applies 4-tap FIR filter method and Mean concept. Furthermore, we propose a novel data supply mechanism, called Snake Path, in order to save hardware area. Presently, we adopt parallel and pipelined architecture for our proposed method in hardware implementation. Through the software simulation, the reconstructed video quality shows approximate image quality compare with traditional 6-tap FIR filter adopting our proposed 6-tap Mean Filter algorithm. Our designs are synthesized with TSMC 0.13 μm technology. The synthesized results show that two proposed algorithms with Snake Path control can save hardware cost 48%and 68%, respectively.