An Efficient ASIC Design of Variable-Length Discrete Cosine Transform for HEVC

Abstract

The latest video coding standard introduced by the joint collaborative team on video coding (JCT-VC) is known as high-efficiency video coding (HEVC) or H.265. HEVC/H.265 is mainly targeted for high-definition videos, and offer more compression than its predecessor. The discrete cosine transform (DCT) is widely used for image and video compression including HEVC. This paper proposes a variablelength DCT architecture for encoding video according to the HEVC/H.265 specifications. The architecture is optimized for most likely block sizes in ultra-high definition (UHD) video, and eliminates unnecessary complexities found in many architectures proposed. The synthesized results with Synopsys design tools show that the proposed method can encode 8K UHD videos @ 60 fps in real-time and accomplishes more than 60% in hardware savings.