Pipelined fast 2D DCT architecture for JPEG image compression

This paper presents the architecture and the VHDL design of a Two Dimensional Discrete Cosine Transform (2-D DCT) for JPEG image compression. This architecture is used as the core of a JPEG compressor and is the critical path in JPEG compression hardware. The 2-D DCT calculation is made using the 2-D DCT separability property, such that the whole architecture is divided into two I-D DCT calculations by using a transpose buffer. These parts are described in this paper, with an architectural discussion and the VHDL synthesis results as well. The 2-D DCT architecture uses 4,792 logic cells of one Altera Flex10kE FPGA and reaches an operating frequency of 12.2 MHz. One input block with 8×8 elements of 8 bits each is processed in 25.2 μs and the pipeline latency is 160 clock cycles