An efficient parallel-pipelined intra prediction architecture to support DCT/DST engine of HEVC encoder

Abstract

The complexity of intra prediction in high-efficiency video coding (HEVC) is increased due to the addition of five variable sized prediction units (PUs) and 35 directional predictions. In this work, we propose an efficient parallel-pipelined architecture that can process 8 samples in parallel for every clock cycle. The functional units needed to predict the PU samples work in a pipelined fashion. With this balanced combination of parallel-pipelined structure, we are able to achieve higher throughput with limited hardware resources than existing literature works. The samples are processed row-wise, so that they can be directly transform coded, thus eliminating the need for an intermediate memory buffer of 8 K between the two modules. A compact reconfigurable reference buffer of size 0.8 KB is incorporated to reduce the read-write latency associated with reference samples’ fetching. A dedicated module for arithmetic operations is used in the intra engine that ensures the reuse of multipliers to increase the hardware efficiency. The architecture so designed supports all the PU sizes and directional modes. The proposed design is tested and implemented on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) platform operating at 150 MHz frequency to achieve 8 samples throughput with a hardware cost of 16.2 K Look-Up Tables (LUTs) and 5.7 K registers to support HD 4 K real-time video encoding applications. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.