An Efficient Pipelined Architecture for H.264/AVC Intra Frame Processing

A number of recent efforts have been made to speed up H.264 intra frame coding. When these algorithms are implemented by dedicated hardware accelerators, these hardware resources are often wasted if intra predictions and reconstructions for 4times4 blocks are serialized. In order to avoid a hardware waste, this paper proposes a pipelined execution of the intra predictions and reconstructions of 4times4 blocks. The processing orders of 4times4 intra predictions are derived for both encoding and decoding, respectively, to reduce the dependencies between consecutively processed blocks and minimize pipeline stalls. The proposed pipelined execution of 4times4 intra predictions for encoding is integrated with the other intra frame encoding operations with an efficient scheduling that allows these other operations to be executed in parallel with intra prediction. When compared with the best previous work for intra frame coding (Suh et al., 2005), the execution time is decreased by 41 % even with reduced hardware resources