Memory-Efficient Hardware Architecture of 2-D Dual-Mode Lifting-Based Discrete Wavelet Transform

Memory requirements (for storing intermediate signals) and critical path are essential issues for 2-D (or multidimensional) transforms. This paper presents new algorithms and hardware architectures to address the above issues in 2-D dual-mode (supporting 5/3 lossless and 9/7 lossy coding) lifting-based discrete wavelet transform (LDWT). The proposed 2-D dual-mode LDWT architecture has the merits of low transpose memory (TM), low latency, and regular signal flow, making it suitable for very large-scale integration implementation. The TM requirement of the N×N 2-D 5/3 mode LDWT and 2-D 9/7 mode LDWT are 2N and 4N, respectively. Comparison results indicate that the proposed hardware architecture has a lower lifting-based low TM size requirement than the previous architectures. As a result, it can be applied to real-time visual operations such as JPEG2000, motion-JPEG2000, MPEG-4 still texture object decoding, and wavelet-based scalable video coding applications.