Dual Mode Architecture for Deblocking Filtering in H.264/AVC Video Coding

Block based video codecs suffer from visible blocking artifacts in the reconstructed video frames. Eliminating the blocking artifacts improves output video quality, significantly. New video coding standards employ adaptive filtering tools to solve this problem. Because of huge computational load of these tools they became the implementation bottlenecks in real-time applications. This paper proposes a high-performance deblocking architecture suited for both dedicated hardware and platform-based implementation of H.264/AVC video codecs. The new architecture supports two operational modes for high-performance and low-power filtering. Working at high-performance mode, the proposed architecture offers 44% to 76% performance improvement compared to the existing state-of-the-art architectures. Half of this performance is achieved while working at low-power mode. In the low-power mode, however, up to 41% of power is saved. Operating at 100MHz, the new architecture supports processing resolution of 2208 times 2000 (4:2:0) at 30 fps