High-Throughput Deblocking Filter Architecture Using Quad Parallel Edge Filter for H.264 Video Coding Systems

With the increasing demand in electronic gadgets expecting better video quality for multimedia applications, various coding standards evolved for the past two decades and optimization on the architectures of the various modules used in the video codec is most popular. In this paper, an efficient architecture for deblocking filter used to smoothen the pixels of the decompressed video data is proposed, which utilizes both pipelining and parallelism. The filtering process follows a sequential order as filtering vertical edges of luma block and chroma block followed by the horizontal edges of the luma block and chroma block. Three pipeline stages are used and four edges, either vertical or horizontal are filtered in parallel. Internal buffers which hold the sub-blocks read from the external frame buffers are accessed in a ping pong fashion to filter the adjacent sub-edges and thus reducing the external memory access cycles. Due to parallelism with novel edge filtering order, self-transposing mechanism, and ping pong buffer access, the throughput is increased. The proposed quad parallel edge deblocking filter architecture is implemented using Synopsys 90 nm library. It achieves a target area of 19.8 K and can process a Macro Block in 58 clock cycles.