Updating strategy based architecture for reference picture management in H.264/AVC

Reference Picture Management is complex for hardware implementation. This paper presents an updating strategy for reference picture lists generation by Prime Lists maintenance. Straight insert sorting is used to find out picture insert index. Segmentation and FFA algorithms are applied to quickly adjust frame and field in Initialization stage. Further more, caching technique is used to accelerate index query which results in cycle reduction for every inter-prediction block decoding. Experiment shows the design costs 21.6 K gates under constraint of 5 ns plus a 34 words, 70-bit wide single port register file. The updating strategy based architecture has active meaning to the hardware RPM design in H.264 decoder.