A Pipelined Hardware Architecture of an H.264 Deblocking Filter with an Efficient Data Distribution

Abstract?In order to reduce blocking artifacts and improve compression efficiency, H.264/AVC standard employs an adaptive in-loop deblocking filter. This paper proposes a new hardware architecture of the deblocking filter that employs a four-stage pipelined structure with an efficient data distribution. The proposed architecture allows a simultaneous supply of eight data samples to fully utilize the pipelined filter in both horizontal and vertical filterings. This paper also presents a new filtering order and data reuse scheme between consecutive macroblock filterings to reduce the communication for external memory access. The number of required cycles for filtering one macroblock (MB) is 357 cycles when the proposed filter uses dual port SRAMs. This execution speed is only 41.3% of that of the fastest previous work.