Evolutionary architecture design for approximate DCT

Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) which has a major role in image and video compression has also a major role in power consumption. Approximate Computing let us trade precision to save power in error resilient applications such as multimedia. Therefore, DCT is a potential candidate for approximation. In this paper, we propose a method for evolutionary design of DCT architecture exploiting the inherent behavior of DCT. Unlike the prior works on DCT approximation, which concentrated mostly on optimizing, replacing, or removing less effective building blocks of DCT, in our proposed method we use the evolutionary method to find new structures for DCT. According to the results, the evolution methods lead to architectures with less area and acceptable accuracy.