Area-time tradeoffs in h.264/AVC deblocking filter design for mobile devices

H.264/AVC is a new international standard for the compression of natural video images, in which deblocking filter has been adopted to remove blocking artifacts. The deblocking filter is either time or area consuming system component. The goal of this paper is a design of area-time efficient H.264/AVC deblocking filter suitable for application in mobile devices. Area-time tradeoff is enabled by using configurable folded bit-plane filter as a core for deblocking filter implementation. Folded filter implementation parameters are obtained in the manner of achievement of minimal area consumption, keeping in mind throughput requirement in mobile devices. Systempsilas architecture is presented in detail, as well as the architecture of folded deblocking filter. With aim to illustrate functionality and tradeoffs related to occupation of chip resources and achieved throughputs we present results of FPGA prototyping. Proposed deblocking filter requires extremely low gate count still meeting the mobile application throughput requirements.