Case Study: Hardware Acceleration of the JPEG2000 Kakadu Library

The NIOS II soft core processor from Altera allows for the easy interfacing of new peripheral blocks to existing software. Using the Kakadu software implementation of JPEG2000, we have added dedicated hardware block encoders to produce an accelerated implementation. Simulation demonstrates that our simple architecture can provide a speedup of 2.55 times, compared to a pure software implementation. The use of both hardware and software allows for an implementation of the entire JPEG2000 standard. We also identify future options for further hardware acceleration of the Kakadu library.