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Early Termination and Pipelining for Hardware Implementation of Fast H.264 Intraprediction Targeting Mobile HD Applications

Abstract

H.264/AVC adopts aggressive compression algorithms at the cost of increased computational complexity. To speed up the H.264/AVC intraframe coding, this paper proposes two novel techniques: early termination and pipelined execution. In P slices, intra 4×4 and 16×16 predictions are early terminated with the threshold determined by the cost of motion estimation. In I slices, intra 4×4 prediction is early terminated with the threshold derived from intra 16×16 prediction. The threshold function is chosen as a monotonically decreasing linear function with its optimal coefficients determined by experiments. For the pipelined execution of 4×4 intrapredictions, the processing order of 4×4 blocks is changed to reduce the dependencies between consecutively processed blocks. In I slices, computation for 4×4 intraprediction is reduced by 19 percent with the proposed early termination. In P slices, computations for 4×4 and 16×16 intrapredictions are reduced by more than 81 and 91 percents, respectively. The pipelined execution reduces the computation time by 41 percent. In spite of the speed-up by the proposed methods, degradation in rate-distortion performance is negligible. The proposed pipelined execution is integrated with other H.264/AVC hardware accelerators and fabricated as an SoC using Dongbu 0.13 μm technology.

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Correspondence to Hyuk-Jae Lee.

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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.

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Jung, JS., Jin, G. & Lee, HJ. Early Termination and Pipelining for Hardware Implementation of Fast H.264 Intraprediction Targeting Mobile HD Applications. EURASIP J. Adv. Signal Process. 2008, 542735 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1155/2008/542735

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1155/2008/542735

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