• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2008.06a
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• pp.407-408
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• 2008

This paper presents a synchronous pipeline design for IP-based H.264 decoding system. The first optimization for pipelining aims at efficiently resolving the data dependency due to motion compensation/intra prediction feedback data flow in H.264 decoder. The second one would enhance the efficiency of execution per each pipelining stage to explore the optimized latency and stage number. Thus, the 3 stage pipeline of CAVLD&ITQ|MC/IP&Rec.|DF is obtained to yield the best throughput and implementation. In experiments, it is found that the synchronous pipelined H.264 decoding system, based on existing IPs, could deal with Full HD video at 125.34MHz, in real time.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2003.11a
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• pp.91-94
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• 2003

H.264/AVC is the upcoming video coding standard of ITU-T H.264 and ISO MPEG-4 AVC. The new standard can achieve a significant improvement up to 50％ in compression ratio compared to MPEG-4 advanced simple profile. In this paper, we propose the novel intra prediction scheme to speed up intra prediction process in H.264/AVC decoder and show the hardware architecture for it. The proposed scheme uses the concurrent processing of the 4$\times$4 intra prediction, which is based on that some 4$\times$4 block pairs in a 16$\times$16 luma block can be processed concurrently. The proposed scheme can reduce intra prediction time by 33 ％.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.44 no.10
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• pp.38-48
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• 2007

The increasing demand on the use of multimedia video contents drives more mobile embedded systems to incorporate H.264/AVC decoding capability. An H.264/AVC decoder often requires high computation bandwidth during its decoding phase. Depending upon processor computation capability and multimedia contents complexity, the decoder can be implemented either in hardware or software. However, without a thorough analysis on the Performance and resource requirements, it is difficult to choose a cost-effective methodology of implementing this codec. This paper presents both hardware and software implementation of H.264/AVC decoding subsystem in mobile embedded systems, and quantitatively analyses the performance and resource requirements. It also shows the methodology to identify performance bottleneck in Linux-based mobile embedded systems, which is in turn used to select feasible and efficient implementation methodology.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.45 no.11
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• pp.71-76
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• 2008

H.264(or MPEG-4/AVC pt.10) is a high performance video coding standard, and is widely used. Variable length code (VLC) of the H.264 standard compresses data using the statistical distribution of values. A decoder parses the compressed bit stream and searches decoded values in lookup tables, and the decoding process is not easy to implement by hardware. We propose an architecture of variable length decoder(VLD) for the H.264 baseline profile(BP) L4. The CAVLD decodes syntax elements using the combination of arithmetic units and lookup tables for the optimized hardware architecture. A barral shifter and a first 1's detector parse NAL bit stream, and are shared by Exp-Golomb decoder and CAVLD. A FIFO memory between CAVLD and the reorder unit and a buffer at the output of the reorder unit eliminate the bottleneck of data stream. The proposed VLD is designed using Verilog-HDL and is implemented using an FPGA. The synthesis result using a 0.18um standard CMOS technology shows that the gate count is 22,604 and the decoder can process HD($1920{\times}1080$) video at 120MHz.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.51 no.5
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• pp.114-124
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• 2014

HEVC is a state-of-the-art video coding standard developed by JCT-VC. HEVC provides about 2 times higher subjective coding efficiency than H.264/AVC. One of the main goal of HEVC development is to efficiently coding UHD resolution video so that HEVC is expected to be widely used for coding UHD resolution video. Decoding such high resolution video generates a large number of memory accesses, so a decoding system needs high-bandwidth for memory system and/or internal communication architecture. In order to determine such requirements, this paper presents an analysis of the memory access complexity for HEVC decoder. we first estimate the amount of memory access performed by software HEVC decoder on an embedded system and a desktop computer. Then, we present the memory bandwidth models for HEVC decoder by analyzing the data flow of HEVC decoding tools. Experimental results show the software decoder produce 6.9-40.5 GB/s of DRAM accesses. also, the analysis reveals the hardware decoder requires 2.4 GB/s of DRAM bandwidth.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.23-30
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• 2010

The H.264/AVC is increasingly used in broadcast video applications such as Internet Protocol television (IPTV), digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) because of high compression performance. But the H.264/AVC coded video can be delivered to the widespread end-user equipment for MPEG-2 after transcoding between this video standards. This paper suggests a new transcoding algorithm for H.264/AVC to MPEG-2 transcoder that uses motion vector clustering in order to reduce the complexity without loss of video quality. The proposed method is exploiting the motion information gathered during h.264 decoding stage. To reduce the search space for the MPEG-2 motion estimation, the predictive motion vector is selected with a least distortion of the candidated motion vectors. These candidate motion vectors are considering the correlation of direction and distance of motion vectors of variable blocks in H.264/AVC. And then the best predictive motion vector is refined with full-search in ${\pm}2$ pixel search area. Compared with a cascaded decoder-encoder, the proposed transcoder achieves computational complexity savings up to 64% with a similar PSNR at the constant bitrate(CBR).

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.28 no.12C
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• pp.1182-1191
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• 2003

In this paper, we propose a new hardware architecture for integer transform, quantizer, inverse quantizer, and inverse integer transform of a new video coding standard H.264/JVT. We describe the algorithm and derive hardware architecture emphasizing the importance of area for low cost and low power consumption. The proposed architecture has been verified by PCI-interfaced emulation board using APEX-II Alters FPGA and also by ASIC synthesis using Samsung 0.18 um CMOS cell library. The ASIC synthesis result shows that the proposed hardware can operate at 100 MHz, processing more than 1,300 QCIF video frames per second. The hardware is going to be used as a core module when implementing a complete H.264 video encoder/decoder ASIC for real-time multimedia application.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2003.11a
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• pp.83-86
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• 2003

In this paper, we propose a new hardware architecture for integer transform, quantizer operation of a new video coding standard H.264/JVT. We describe the algorithm to derive hardware architecture emphasizing the importance of area for low cost and low power consumption. The proposed architecture has been verified by PCI-interfaced emulation board using APEX-II Altera FPGA and also by ASIC synthesis using Samsung 0.18 ${\mu}{\textrm}{m}$ CMOS cell library. The ASIC synthesis result shows that the proposed hardware can operate at 100 MHz, processing more than 1, 300 QCIF video frames per second. The hardware is going to be used as a core module when implementing a complete H.264 video encoder/decoder ASIC for real-time multimedia application.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2009.10a
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• pp.175-178
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• 2009

H.264/AVC is a video coding standard of ITU-T and ISO/IEC, and widely spreads its application due to its high compression ratio more than twice that of MPEG-2 and high image quality. In this paper, we explained Intra Prediction in H.264/AVC, which is able to achieve higher compressing efficiency from correlation removal of adjacent samples in spatial domain, and proposed efficient Intra Predictor architecture design for H.264/AVC decoder. The proposed system reduced computation cycle using processing element and precomputation processing element and also reduced the number of access to external memory using efficient register. We designed the proposed system with Verilog-HDL and verified with suitable test vector. The proposed Intra Predictor achieved about 60% cycle reduction comparing with existing Intra Predictors.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.11 no.6
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• pp.1104-1114
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• 2007

Digital video compression technique has played an important role that enables efficient transmission and storage of multimedia data where bandwidth and storage space are limited. The new video coding standard, H.264/AVC, developed by Joint Video Team(JVT) significantly outperforms previous standards in compression performance. Especially, variable length code(VLC) plays a crucial pun in video and image compression applications. H.264/AVC standard adopted Context-based Adaptive Variable Length Coding(CAVLC) as the entropy coding method. CAVLC of H.264/AVC requires a large number of the memory accesses. This is a serious problem for applications such as DMB and video phone service because of the considerable amount of power that is consumed in accessing the memory. In order to overcome this problem in this paper, we propose a variable length technique that implements memory-free coeff_token, level, and run_before decoding based on arithmetic operations and using only 70% of the required memory at total_zero variable length decoding.