Low energy HEVC and VVC video compression hardware

Video compression standards compress a digital video by reducing and removing redundancy in the digital video using computationally complex algorithms. As spatial and temporal resolutions of videos increase, compression efficiencies of video compression algorithms are also increasing. However, increased compression efficiency comes with increased computational complexity. Therefore, it is necessary to reduce computational complexities of video compression algorithms without reducing their visual quality in order to reduce area and energy consumption of their hardware implementations. In this thesis, we propose a novel technique for reducing amount of computations performed by HEVC intra prediction algorithm. We designed low energy, reconfigurable HEVC intra prediction hardware using the proposed technique. We also designed a low energy FPGA implementation of HEVC intra prediction algorithm using the proposed technique and DSP blocks. We propose a reconfigurable VVC intra prediction hardware architecture. We also propose an efficient VVC intra prediction hardware architecture using DSP blocks. We designed low energy VVC fractional interpolation hardware. We propose a novel approximate absolute difference technique. We designed low energy approximate absolute difference hardware using the proposed technique. We propose a novel approximate constant multiplication technique. We designed approximate constant multiplication hardware using the proposed technique. We quantified computation reductions achieved by the proposed techniques and video quality loss caused by the proposed approximation techniques. The proposed approximate absolute difference technique and approximate constant multiplication technique cause very small PSNR loss. The other proposed techniques cause no PSNR loss. We implemented the proposed hardware architectures in Verilog HDL. We mapped the Verilog RTL codes to Xilinx Virtex 6 or Xilinx Virtex 7 FPGAs and estimated their power consumptions using Xilinx XPower Analyzer tool. The proposed techniques significantly reduced power and energy consumptions of these FPGA implementation

Efficient reconfigurable architectures for 3D medical image compression

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Recently, the more widespread use of three-dimensional (3-D) imaging modalities, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), positron emission tomography (PET), and ultrasound (US) have generated a massive amount of volumetric data. These have provided an impetus to the development of other applications, in particular telemedicine and teleradiology. In these fields, medical image compression is important since both efficient storage and transmission of data through high-bandwidth digital communication lines are of crucial importance. Despite their advantages, most 3-D medical imaging algorithms are computationally intensive with matrix transformation as the most fundamental operation involved in the transform-based methods. Therefore, there is a real need for high-performance systems, whilst keeping architectures exible to allow for quick upgradeability with real-time applications. Moreover, in order to obtain efficient solutions for large medical volumes data, an efficient implementation of these operations is of significant importance. Reconfigurable hardware, in the form of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) has been proposed as viable system building block in the construction of high-performance systems at an economical price. Consequently, FPGAs seem an ideal candidate to harness and exploit their inherent advantages such as massive parallelism capabilities, multimillion gate counts, and special low-power packages. The key achievements of the work presented in this thesis are summarised as follows. Two architectures for 3-D Haar wavelet transform (HWT) have been proposed based on transpose-based computation and partial reconfiguration suitable for 3-D medical imaging applications. These applications require continuous hardware servicing, and as a result dynamic partial reconfiguration (DPR) has been introduced. Comparative study for both non-partial and partial reconfiguration implementation has shown that DPR offers many advantages and leads to a compelling solution for implementing computationally intensive applications such as 3-D medical image compression. Using DPR, several large systems are mapped to small hardware resources, and the area, power consumption as well as maximum frequency are optimised and improved. Moreover, an FPGA-based architecture of the finite Radon transform (FRAT)with three design strategies has been proposed: direct implementation of pseudo-code with a sequential or pipelined description, and block random access memory (BRAM)- based method. An analysis with various medical imaging modalities has been carried out. Results obtained for image de-noising implementation using FRAT exhibits promising results in reducing Gaussian white noise in medical images. In terms of hardware implementation, promising trade-offs on maximum frequency, throughput and area are also achieved. Furthermore, a novel hardware implementation of 3-D medical image compression system with context-based adaptive variable length coding (CAVLC) has been proposed. An evaluation of the 3-D integer transform (IT) and the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) with lifting scheme (LS) for transform blocks reveal that 3-D IT demonstrates better computational complexity than the 3-D DWT, whilst the 3-D DWT with LS exhibits a lossless compression that is significantly useful for medical image compression. Additionally, an architecture of CAVLC that is capable of compressing high-definition (HD) images in real-time without any buffer between the quantiser and the entropy coder is proposed. Through a judicious parallelisation, promising results have been obtained with limited resources. In summary, this research is tackling the issues of massive 3-D medical volumes data that requires compression as well as hardware implementation to accelerate the slowest operations in the system. Results obtained also reveal a significant achievement in terms of the architecture efficiency and applications performance.Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia (MOHE), Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia (UTHM) and the British Counci

Study and development of innovative strategies for energy-efficient cross-layer design of digital VLSI systems based on Approximate Computing

The increasing demand on requirements for high performance and energy efficiency in modern digital systems has led to the research of new design approaches that are able to go beyond the established energy-performance tradeoff. Looking at scientific literature, the Approximate Computing paradigm has been particularly prolific. Many applications in the domain of signal processing, multimedia, computer vision, machine learning are known to be particularly resilient to errors occurring on their input data and during computation, producing outputs that, although degraded, are still largely acceptable from the point of view of quality. The Approximate Computing design paradigm leverages the characteristics of this group of applications to develop circuits, architectures, algorithms that, by relaxing design constraints, perform their computations in an approximate or inexact manner reducing energy consumption. This PhD research aims to explore the design of hardware/software architectures based on Approximate Computing techniques, filling the gap in literature regarding effective applicability and deriving a systematic methodology to characterize its benefits and tradeoffs. The main contributions of this work are: -the introduction of approximate memory management inside the Linux OS, allowing dynamic allocation and de-allocation of approximate memory at user level, as for normal exact memory; - the development of an emulation environment for platforms with approximate memory units, where faults are injected during the simulation based on models that reproduce the effects on memory cells of circuital and architectural techniques for approximate memories; -the implementation and analysis of the impact of approximate memory hardware on real applications: the H.264 video encoder, internally modified to allocate selected data buffers in approximate memory, and signal processing applications (digital filter) using approximate memory for input/output buffers and tap registers; -the development of a fully reconfigurable and combinatorial floating point unit, which can work with reduced precision formats

Design and Analysis of Multiplexer based Approximate Adder for Low Power Applications

Low power consumption is crucial for error-acceptable multimedia devices, with picture compression approaches leveraging various digital processing architectures and algorithms. Humans can assemble useful information from partially inaccurate outputs in many multimedia applications. As a result, producing exact outputs is not required. The demand for an exact outcome is fading because new innovative systems are forgiving of faults. In the domain where error-tolerance is accepted, approximate computing is a new paradigm that relaxes the requirement for an accurate modeling while offering power, time, and delay benefits. Adders are an essential arithmetic module for regulating power and memory usage in digital systems. The recent implementation and use of approximate adders have been supported by trade-off characteristics such as delay, lower power consumption. This study examines the delay and power consumption of conventional and approximate adders. Also, a simple, fast, and power-efficient multiplexer-based approximate adder is proposed, and its performance outperforms the adders compared with existing adders. The proposed adder can be utilized in error-tolerant and various digital signal processing applications where exact results are not required. The proposed and existing adders are designed using EDA software for the performance calculations. With a delay of 81 pS, the proposed adder circuit reduces power consumption compared to the exact one. The experiment shows that the designed approximate adder can be used to implement circuits for image processing systems because it has a smaller delay and uses less energy

Approximate and timing-speculative hardware design for high-performance and energy-efficient video processing

Since the end of transistor scaling in 2-D appeared on the horizon, innovative circuit design paradigms have been on the rise to go beyond the well-established and ultraconservative exact computing. Many compute-intensive applications – such as video processing – exhibit an intrinsic error resilience and do not necessarily require perfect accuracy in their numerical operations. Approximate computing (AxC) is emerging as a design alternative to improve the performance and energy-efficiency requirements for many applications by trading its intrinsic error tolerance with algorithm and circuit efficiency. Exact computing also imposes a worst-case timing to the conventional design of hardware accelerators to ensure reliability, leading to an efficiency loss. Conversely, the timing-speculative (TS) hardware design paradigm allows increasing the frequency or decreasing the voltage beyond the limits determined by static timing analysis (STA), thereby narrowing pessimistic safety margins that conventional design methods implement to prevent hardware timing errors. Timing errors should be evaluated by an accurate gate-level simulation, but a significant gap remains: How these timing errors propagate from the underlying hardware all the way up to the entire algorithm behavior, where they just may degrade the performance and quality of service of the application at stake? This thesis tackles this issue by developing and demonstrating a cross-layer framework capable of performing investigations of both AxC (i.e., from approximate arithmetic operators, approximate synthesis, gate-level pruning) and TS hardware design (i.e., from voltage over-scaling, frequency over-clocking, temperature rising, and device aging). The cross-layer framework can simulate both timing errors and logic errors at the gate-level by crossing them dynamically, linking the hardware result with the algorithm-level, and vice versa during the evolution of the application’s runtime. Existing frameworks perform investigations of AxC and TS techniques at circuit-level (i.e., at the output of the accelerator) agnostic to the ultimate impact at the application level (i.e., where the impact is truly manifested), leading to less optimization. Unlike state of the art, the framework proposed offers a holistic approach to assessing the tradeoff of AxC and TS techniques at the application-level. This framework maximizes energy efficiency and performance by identifying the maximum approximation levels at the application level to fulfill the required good enough quality. This thesis evaluates the framework with an 8-way SAD (Sum of Absolute Differences) hardware accelerator operating into an HEVC encoder as a case study. Application-level results showed that the SAD based on the approximate adders achieve savings of up to 45% of energy/operation with an increase of only 1.9% in BD-BR. On the other hand, VOS (Voltage Over-Scaling) applied to the SAD generates savings of up to 16.5% in energy/operation with around 6% of increase in BD-BR. The framework also reveals that the boost of about 6.96% (at 50°) to 17.41% (at 75° with 10- Y aging) in the maximum clock frequency achieved with TS hardware design is totally lost by the processing overhead from 8.06% to 46.96% when choosing an unreliable algorithm to the blocking match algorithm (BMA). We also show that the overhead can be avoided by adopting a reliable BMA. This thesis also shows approximate DTT (Discrete Tchebichef Transform) hardware proposals by exploring a transform matrix approximation, truncation and pruning. The results show that the approximate DTT hardware proposal increases the maximum frequency up to 64%, minimizes the circuit area in up to 43.6%, and saves up to 65.4% in power dissipation. The DTT proposal mapped for FPGA shows an increase of up to 58.9% on the maximum frequency and savings of about 28.7% and 32.2% on slices and dynamic power, respectively compared with stat

Application-Specific Number Representation

Reconfigurable devices, such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), enable application- specific number representations. Well-known number formats include fixed-point, floating- point, logarithmic number system (LNS), and residue number system (RNS). Such different number representations lead to different arithmetic designs and error behaviours, thus produc- ing implementations with different performance, accuracy, and cost. To investigate the design options in number representations, the first part of this thesis presents a platform that enables automated exploration of the number representation design space. The second part of the thesis shows case studies that optimise the designs for area, latency or throughput from the perspective of number representations. Automated design space exploration in the first part addresses the following two major issues: ² Automation requires arithmetic unit generation. This thesis provides optimised arithmetic library generators for logarithmic and residue arithmetic units, which support a wide range of bit widths and achieve significant improvement over previous designs. ² Generation of arithmetic units requires specifying the bit widths for each variable. This thesis describes an automatic bit-width optimisation tool called R-Tool, which combines dynamic and static analysis methods, and supports different number systems (fixed-point, floating-point, and LNS numbers). Putting it all together, the second part explores the effects of application-specific number representation on practical benchmarks, such as radiative Monte Carlo simulation, and seismic imaging computations. Experimental results show that customising the number representations brings benefits to hardware implementations: by selecting a more appropriate number format, we can reduce the area cost by up to 73.5% and improve the throughput by 14.2% to 34.1%; by performing the bit-width optimisation, we can further reduce the area cost by 9.7% to 17.3%. On the performance side, hardware implementations with customised number formats achieve 5 to potentially over 40 times speedup over software implementations

VHDL Modeling of an H.264/AVC Video Decoder

Transmission and storage of video data has necessitated the development of video com pression techniques. One of today\u27s most widely used video compression techniques is the MPEG-2 standard, which is over ten years old. A task force sponsored by the same groups that developed MPEG-2 has recently finished defining a new standard that is meant to replace MPEG-2 for future video compression applications. This standard, H.264/AVC, uses significantly improved compression techniques. It is capable of providing similar pic ture quality at bit rates of 30-70% less than MPEG-2, depending on the particular video sequence and application [20]. This thesis developed a complete VHDL behavioral model of a video decoder imple menting the Baseline Profile of the H.264/AVC standard. The decoder was verified using a testing environment for comparison with reference software results. Development of a synthesizable hardware description was also shown for two components of the video de coder: the transform unit and the deblocking filter. This demonstrated how a complete video decoder could be developed one module at a time with individual module verifica tion. Analysis was also done to estimate the performance and hardware requirements for a complete implementation on an FPGA device