Hardware Design of High Performance ALF in HEVC Encoder for Efficient Filter Coefficient Estimation

This paper proposes the hardware architecture of high performance ALF(Adaptive Loop Filter) for efficient filter coefficient estimation. In order to make the original image which has high resolution and high quality into highly compressed image effectively and also, subjective image quality into improved image, the ALF technique of HEVC performs a filtering by estimating filter coefficients using statistical characteristics of image. The proposed ALF hardware architecture is designed with a 2-step pipelined architecture for a reduction in performance cycle by analysing an operation relationship of Cholesky decomposition for the filter coefficient estimation. Also, in the operation process of the Cholesky decomposition, a square root operation is designed to reduce logic area, computation time and computation complexity by using the multiplexer, subtracter and comparator. The proposed hardware architecture is designed using Xilinx ISE 14.3 Vertex-7 XC7VCX485T FPGA device and can support 4K UHD@40fps in real time at a maximum operation frequency of 186MHz. 키워드 : HEVC encoder, ALF(적응적 루프 필터), 촐레스키 분해, FPGA Key word : HEVC encoder, ALF(Adaptive Loop Filter), Cholesky decomposition, FPGA