Embedded architecture for fast implementation of H.264 subpixel interpolation

H.264 is the latest video compression standard. Its rate distortion is greatly improved comparing to the MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.261 and H.263. Among many features of H.264, sub-pixel motion compensation is one of the factors that make H.264 a better coding scheme. H.264 implements both half-pixel interpolation and quarter-pixel interpolation. The computational complexity of sub-pixel motion compensation is therefore high. This paper presents an efficient VLSI architecture for fast implementation of sub-pixel interpolation of H.264. Several techniques are designed to reduce the number of memory access and accelerate the interpolation computations.