A high performance and low power hardware architecture for the transform & quantization stages in H.264

Abstract

In this work, we present a hardware architecture prototype for the various types of transforms and the accompanying quantization, supported in H.264 baseline profile video encoding standard. The proposed architecture achieves high performance and can satisfy Quad Full High Definition (QFHD) (3840x2160@150Hz) coding. The transforms are implemented using only add and shift operations, which reduces the computation overhead. A modification in the quantization equations representation is suggested to remove the absolute value and resign operation stages overhead. Additionally, a post-scale Hadamard transform computation is presented. The architecture can achieve a reduction of about 20% in power consumption, compared to existing implementations. ©2009 IEEE.