An implemented architecture of deblocking filter for H.264/AVC

H.264/AVC is a new international standard for the compression of natural video images, in which a deblocking filter has been adopted to remove blocking artifacts. We propose an efficient processing order for the deblocking filter, and present the VLSI architecture according to the order. Making good use of data dependence between neighboring 4/spl times/4 blocks, our design reduces the requirement of on-chip SRAM bandwidth and increases the throughput of the filter processing. The architecture has been described in Verilog HDL, simulated with VCS and synthesized using 0.25 /spl mu/m CMOS cells library by Synopsys Design Compiler. The circuit costs about 24k logic gates (not including a 32/spl times/64 SRAM and two 32/spl times/96 SRAMs) when the working frequency is set to 100 MHz. This design can support real-time deblocking of HDTV (1280/spl times/720, 60 fps) H.264/AVC video. This architecture is valuable for the hardware design of an H.264/AVC codec.