Design optimization of the quantization and a pipelined 2D-DCT for real-time applications

• Published in: Multimedia tools and applications Vol. 67; no. 3; pp. 667 - 685
• Main Authors: Hatim, Anas, Belkouch, Said, El Aakif, Mohamed, Hassani, Moha M’rabet, Chabini, Noureddine
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston Springer US 01.12.2013; Springer; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Algorithms; Analysis; Applied sciences; Architecture; Artificial intelligence; Coding, codes; Computer Communication Networks; Computer Science; Computer science; control theory; systems; Data Structures and Information Theory; Design optimization; Exact sciences and technology; Field programmable gate arrays; Image compression; Image processing systems; Image quality; Information, signal and communications theory; Matlab; Multimedia communications; Multimedia Information Systems; Multiplication; Pattern recognition. Digital image processing. Computational geometry; Processing speed; Quality standards; Quantization; Signal and communications theory; Special Purpose and Application-Based Systems; Studies; Telecommunications and information theory; Video compression; Video compression; Discret cosine transform; FPGA; Optimisation; JPEG compression; Energy consumption; Pipeline processor; Computer arithmetic; Data compression; Image compression; Field programmable gate array; Real time; Optimization; Cosine transform; Image quality; Signal quantization; Resource management; Discrete cosine transforms
• ISSN: 1380-7501; 1573-7721
• DOI: 10.1007/s11042-012-1043-y

The Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) is one of the most widely used techniques for image compression. Several algorithms are proposed to implement the DCT-2D. The scaled SDCT algorithm is an optimization of the DCT-1D, which consists in gathering all the multiplications at the end. In this paper, in addition to the hardware implementation on an FPGA, an extended optimization has been performed by merging the multiplications in the quantization block without having an impact on the image quality. A simplified quantization has been performed also to keep higher the performances of the all chain. Tests using MATLAB environment have shown that our proposed approach produces images with nearly the same quality of the ones obtained using the JPEG standard. FPGA-based implementations of this proposed approach is presented and compared to other state of the art techniques. The target is an an Altera Cyclone II FPGA using the Quartus synthesis tool. Results show that our approach outperforms the other ones in terms of processing-speed, used resources and power consumption. A comparison has been done between this architecture and a distributed arithmetic based architecture.