CFU: multi-purpose configurable filtering unit for mobile multimedia applications on graphics hardware

Abstract

In order to increase the capability of mobile GPUs in image/video processing, a multi-purpose configurable filtering unit (CFU), which is a new configurable unit for image filtering on stream processing architecture, is proposed in this paper. CFU is located in the texture unit of a GPU and can efficiently execute many kinds of filtering operations by directly accessing multi-bank texture cache and specially-designed data-paths. The following programmabilities are supported in our proposed CFU. First, different sampling point windows can be selected by programmers. Besides, the arithmetic type of the filter can be chosen. Not only original texture filtering functions and finite impulse response (FIR) filters, morphological operations in computer vision are also embedded in CFU. Furthermore, the weighting coefficients of FIR filters and morphological operations can be defined by programmers. Simulation results show that in average, compared with conventional texture unit, 25.35% of processing time in H.264/AVC motion compensation and 58.6% of processing time in video segmentation can be reduced with the assistance of CFU.