Lossless Reference Frame Compression Combined with Read and Write Behaviors of HEVC and VVC Codecs

With the emergence of immersive videos like 8K@l20fps, memory bandwidth induced by reference frames is gradually becoming the bottleneck of codecs. This paper analyzes related data caching strategies and then proposes a lossless reference frame compression algorithm and its hardware implementation, which combines read and write behaviors of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) and Versatile Video Coding (VVC) codecs. The basic block of this algorithm has adaptive sizes, which would be predicted with the median edge detector (MED) and encoded with optimized semi-fixed-length (SFL) coding. For HEVC and VVC sequences, results demonstrate an average reduction of 68.22% and 74.49% in memory bandwidth. The corresponding compressor and decompressor take 36. 9K and 50. 6K gates when implemented with TSMC 65nm technology, which could achieve high throughputs of11.47 and 6.27 Gpixels/s respectively, equivalent to 8K@267fps and 8K@l88fps.