Resources sharing in HEVC de-blocking filter core

Abstract

The up-coming video compression standard, high efficiency video coding (HEVC), reduces 50% bit rates in encoding video sequences with same picture quality compared to H.264/AVC. The de-blocking filter is an important part in HEVC. By exploiting the arithmetic operation of HEVC de-blocking filter, we propose a HEVC de-blocking filter core in which resources share techniques are used to reduce the hardware cost. We divide the HEVC de-blocking filter into 2 parts: one is strong luma filter (SLF), the other is weak luma and chroma filter (WLCF). In the strong luma filter, common parts for the arithmetic operations to obtain the filtered pixels are extracted. In the weak luma and chroma filter, the chroma de-blocking filtering can be implemented as a subset of weak luma filtering. By using the proposed techniques, the cost of de-blocking filter is greatly lowered.