A cost-efficient hardware architecture of deblocking filter in HEVC

This paper presents a hardware architecture of deblocking filter (DBF) for High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) by jointly considering system throughput and hardware cost. A hybrid pipeline with two processing levels is adopted to improve system performance. With the hybrid pipeline, only one 1-D filter and single-port on-chip SRAM are used. According to the data dependence between neighbouring edges, a shifted 16×16 basic processing unit as well as corresponding filtering order is proposed. It reduces memory cost and makes the DBF friendlier to work in a coding/decoding system. The proposed hardware architecture is synthesized under 0.13um standard CMOS technology and result shows that it consumes 17.6k gates at an operating frequency of 250MHz. Consequently, the design can support real-time processing of QFHD (3840×2160) video applications at 60 fps.