Efficient Compression-Based Line Buffer Design for Image/Video Processing Circuits

Line buffer is a typical and major on-chip memory design architecture for image/video processing circuits. As it usually occupies very large on-chip circuit area, it is of great importance to reduce its hardware cost through efficient architecture design. Data compression is a promising technique to improve the hardware efficiency of line buffer architecture. Nevertheless, the previously proposed data compression technique for line buffer architecture only exploits fixed length code (FLC), which actually has the deficiency on compression performance. Instead, this paper explores to efficiently use variable length code in line buffer architecture. By restricting variable length coding within small compression granularity (CG), the proposed compression algorithm not only significantly improves compression performance but also meets the specific requirements in line buffer architecture design. The simple compression algorithm further enables the efficient and fully pipelined VLSI architecture and circuits. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed compression algorithm achieves 6.67-dB peak signal-to-noise ratio improvement at the compression ratio of 50% and the CG of 16 pixels, compared with FLC design. The VLSI circuits of the proposed compression can achieve the throughput of 4K × 2K at 60 fps with reasonable hardware cost. The use of the proposed compression technique in line buffer architecture can significantly reduce on-chip memory cost while maintaining satisfactory visual quality.