Hardware-efficient architecture design of tree-depth scanning and multiple quantization scheme for MPEG-4 still texture coding

This paper presents a hardware-efficient architecture of tree-depth scanning (TDS) and multiple-quantization (MQ) scheme for MPEC-4 still texture coding. By means of the novel architecture, the TDS can achieve its maximal throughput to area ratio and minimal external memory access with only one wavelet-tree size on-chip memory. Besides, MQ adopts the proposed POT (power of 2) quantization, which is proved to have very similar performance to generic (user-defined coefficients) scalar quantization, to achieve the most cost-effective hardware implementation. The prototyping chip has been implemented in a TSMC 0.35 /spl mu/m CMOS technology. This architecture can handle 30 4-CIF frames per second with 5 spatial layers and 3 SNR layers scalability at 100 MHz clock frequency.