Programmable Deblocking Filter Architecture for a VC-1 Video Decoder

Although the current standards (MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, H.261, H.263, and H.264/MPEG4 AVC) as well as the recent VC-1, present the same basic functional elements, i.e., prediction, transformation, quantization, and entropy encoding, important changes occur in the details of each functional element. One of the details concerns the elimination of the loss in interblock correlation due to block-based prediction, transformation, and quantization. In order to overcome the loss in blocking artifacts, a deblocking filtering method is necessary to maximize coding performance and consequently improve image quality. This letter describes a programmable VC-1 deblocking filter architecture with capabilities to support different standards. The architecture has been modeled, simulated, and implemented at the register transfer level. Results show a threefold performance improvement as compared to solutions where filtering algorithms are otherwise not hardwired. Results also point to parallelism based on existing data flow, and show that real-time requirements can be met.