Energy efficient hardware acceleration of multimedia processing tools

The world of mobile devices is experiencing an ongoing trend of feature enhancement and generalpurpose multimedia platform convergence. This trend poses many grand challenges, the most pressing being their limited battery life as a consequence of delivering computationally demanding features. The envisaged mobile application features can be considered to be accelerated by a set of underpinning hardware blocks Based on the survey that this thesis presents on modem video compression standards and their associated enabling technologies, it is concluded that tight energy and throughput constraints can still be effectively tackled at algorithmic level in order to design re-usable optimised hardware acceleration cores. To prove these conclusions, the work m this thesis is focused on two of the basic enabling technologies that support mobile video applications, namely the Shape Adaptive Discrete Cosine Transform (SA-DCT) and its inverse, the SA-IDCT. The hardware architectures presented in this work have been designed with energy efficiency in mind. This goal is achieved by employing high level techniques such as redundant computation elimination, parallelism and low switching computation structures. Both architectures compare favourably against the relevant pnor art in the literature. The SA-DCT/IDCT technologies are instances of a more general computation - namely, both are Constant Matrix Multiplication (CMM) operations. Thus, this thesis also proposes an algorithm for the efficient hardware design of any general CMM-based enabling technology. The proposed algorithm leverages the effective solution search capability of genetic programming. A bonus feature of the proposed modelling approach is that it is further amenable to hardware acceleration. Another bonus feature is an early exit mechanism that achieves large search space reductions .Results show an improvement on state of the art algorithms with future potential for even greater savings

VLSI Implementation of Reversible Watermarking Algorithm

This paper presents VLSI design approach and implementation of Lifting based Reversible Watermarking Algorithm. 5 by 3 Lifting based Discrete Wavelet Transform based image watermarking algorithm is proposed. It is attractive algorithm because of easier understanding and implement. Main feature of Lifting based scheme is that all constructions are derived in the spatial domain. Therefore it does not require complex mathematical calculations that are required in traditional method. This algorithm is mainly applicable in Military application as well as Medical application where reconstruction of original image and watermarking data (or image) is essential from the watermarked image after serving intended purpose. In this algorithm, image is decomposed into four sub bands LL, LH, HL, and HH using Lifting based DWT Algorithm. Then watermarking data (or image) is embedded into any of three high frequency sub bands. The interesting point of this algorithm is that original image can be exactly restored from the watermarked image. The architecture of Lifting based DWT Algorithm has been coded in verilog HDL on Xilinx platform and the target FPGA device used is Virtex-IV family. DOI: 10.17762/ijritcc2321-8169.15058

The DLMT hardware implementation. A comparative study with the DCT and the DWT

In the last recent years, with the popularity of image compression techniques, many architectures have been proposed. Those have been generally based on the Forward and Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform (FDCT, IDCT). Alternatively, compression schemes based on discrete "wavelets" transform (DWT), used, both, in JPEG2000 coding standard and in H264-SVC (Scalable Video Coding) standard, do not need to divide the image into non-overlapping blocks or macroblocks. This paper discusses the DLMT (Discrete Lopez-Moreno Transform) hardware implementation. It proposes a new scheme intermediate between the DCT and the DWT, comparing results of the most relevant proposed architectures for benchmarking. The DLMT can also be applied over a whole image, but this does not involve increasing computational complexity. FPGA implementation results show that the proposed DLMT has significant performance benefits and improvements comparing with the DCT and the DWT and consequently it is very suitable for implementation on WSN (Wireless Sensor Network) applications

The DLMT. An alternative to the DCT

In the last recent years, with the popularity of image compression techniques, many architectures have been proposed. Those have been generally based on the Forward and Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform (FDCT, IDCT). Alternatively, compression schemes based on discrete “wavelets” transform (DWT), used, both, in JPEG2000 coding standard and in the next H264-SVC (Scalable Video Coding), do not need to divide the image into non-overlapping blocks or macroblocks. This paper discusses the DLMT (Discrete Lopez-Moreno Transform). It proposes a new scheme intermediate between the DCT and the DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform). The DLMT is computationally very similar to the DCT and uses quasi-sinusoidal functions, so the emergence of artifact blocks and their effects have a relative low importance. The use of quasi-sinusoidal functions has allowed achieving a multiresolution control quite close to that obtained by a DWT, but without increasing the computational complexity of the transformation. The DLMT can also be applied over a whole image, but this does not involve increasing computational complexity. Simulation results in MATLAB show that the proposed DLMT has significant performance benefits and improvements comparing with the DC

Joint Optimization of Low-power DCT Architecture and Effcient Quantization Technique for Embedded Image Compression

International audienceThe Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT)-based image com- pression is widely used in today's communication systems. Signi cant research devoted to this domain has demonstrated that the optical com- pression methods can o er a higher speed but su er from bad image quality and a growing complexity. To meet the challenges of higher im- age quality and high speed processing, in this chapter, we present a joint system for DCT-based image compression by combining a VLSI archi- tecture of the DCT algorithm and an e cient quantization technique. Our approach is, rstly, based on a new granularity method in order to take advantage of the adjacent pixel correlation of the input blocks and to improve the visual quality of the reconstructed image. Second, a new architecture based on the Canonical Signed Digit and a novel Common Subexpression Elimination technique is proposed to replace the constant multipliers. Finally, a recon gurable quantization method is presented to e ectively save the computational complexity. Experimental results obtained with a prototype based on FPGA implementation and com- parisons with existing works corroborate the validity of the proposed optimizations in terms of power reduction, speed increase, silicon area saving and PSNR improvement

Development of Low Power Image Compression Techniques

Digital camera is the main medium for digital photography. The basic operation performed by a simple digital camera is, to convert the light energy to electrical energy, then the energy is converted to digital format and a compression algorithm is used to reduce memory requirement for storing the image. This compression algorithm is frequently called for capturing and storing the images. This leads us to develop an efficient compression algorithm which will give the same result as that of the existing algorithms with low power consumption. As a result the new algorithm implemented camera can be used for capturing more images then the previous one. 1) Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) based JPEG is an accepted standard for lossy compression of still image. Quantisation is mainly responsible for the amount loss in the image quality in the process of lossy compression. A new Energy Quantisation (EQ) method proposed for speeding up the coding and decoding procedure while preserving image qu..

A SYSTEMC/SIMULINK CO-SIMULATION ENVIRONMENT OF THE JPEG ALGORITHM

In the past decades, many factors have been continuously increasing like the functionality of embedded systems as well as the time-to-market pressure has been continuously increasing. Simulation of an entire system including both hardware and software from early design stages is one of the effective approaches to improve the design productivity. A large number of research efforts on hardware/software (HW/SW) co-simulation have been made so far. Real-time operating systems have become one of the important components in the embedded systems. However, in order to validate function of the entire system, this system has to be simulated together with application software and hardware. Indeed, traditional methods of verification have proven to be insufficient for complex digital systems. Register transfer level test-benches have become too complex to manage and too slow to execute. New methods and verification techniques began to emerge over the past few years. Highlevel test-benches, assertion-based verification, formal methods, hardware verification languages are just a few examples of the intense research activities driving the verification domain

Image Processing using Approximate Data-path Units

abstract: In this work, we present approximate adders and multipliers to reduce data-path complexity of specialized hardware for various image processing systems. These approximate circuits have a lower area, latency and power consumption compared to their accurate counterparts and produce fairly accurate results. We build upon the work on approximate adders and multipliers presented in [23] and [24]. First, we show how choice of algorithm and parallel adder design can be used to implement 2D Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) algorithm with good performance but low area. Our implementation of the 2D DCT has comparable PSNR performance with respect to the algorithm presented in [23] with ~35-50% reduction in area. Next, we use the approximate 2x2 multiplier presented in [24] to implement parallel approximate multipliers. We demonstrate that if some of the 2x2 multipliers in the design of the parallel multiplier are accurate, the accuracy of the multiplier improves significantly, especially when two large numbers are multiplied. We choose Gaussian FIR Filter and Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithms to illustrate the efficacy of our proposed approximate multiplier. We show that application of the proposed approximate multiplier improves the PSNR performance of 32x32 FFT implementation by 4.7 dB compared to the implementation using the approximate multiplier described in [24]. We also implement a state-of-the-art image enlargement algorithm, namely Segment Adaptive Gradient Angle (SAGA) [29], in hardware. The algorithm is mapped to pipelined hardware blocks and we synthesized the design using 90 nm technology. We show that a 64x64 image can be processed in 496.48 µs when clocked at 100 MHz. The average PSNR performance of our implementation using accurate parallel adders and multipliers is 31.33 dB and that using approximate parallel adders and multipliers is 30.86 dB, when evaluated against the original image. The PSNR performance of both designs is comparable to the performance of the double precision floating point MATLAB implementation of the algorithm.Dissertation/ThesisM.S. Computer Science 201