Median Filter Architecture by Accumulative Parallel Counters

The time to process each of the $W/B$ processing blocks of a median calculation method on a set of $N$ $W$ -bit integers is improved here by a factor of three compared with literature. The parallelism uncovered in blocks containing $B$ -bit slices is exploited by independent accumulative parallel counters so that the median is calculated faster than any known previous method for any $N, W$ values. The improvements to the method are discussed in the context of calculating the median for a moving set of $N$ integers, for which a pipelined architecture is developed. An extra benefit of a smaller area for the architecture is also reported.