A H.264 Deblocking Filter Design And Its HW/SW Co-simulation

H.264 is a new generation of international video encoding standard, which is formed by MPEG and VCEG. Comparing with MPEG-2, the previous generation of video encoding standard, it doubles the video compression ratio. By now, H.264 is widely used in video related products in many industry filed, such as safety, entertainment, etc.The de-blocking filter is an important module of the H.264 codec. It improves the quality of the coded pictures effectively, and also contributes to the high compression ratio. However, the de-blocking algorithm is relatively complex, and its data throughput is large, which costs much bus bandwidth. Furthermore, the MBAFF feature even complicates the data fetching operation.In this thesis, the de-blocking filtering and data buffering technology is discussed. A MBAFF supported novel high-performance de-blocking filter structure and its software is proposed:1. A novel buffer structure is proposed. It supports data accessing in both row and column directions, which eases the data fetching operation of de-blocking filter and supports the MBAFF feature.2. A dynamic loading and filtering mechanism is proposed. In which, only the necessary data is loaded and filtered, it can save processing time and reduce the data throughput.3. An optimized process ordering and buffer scheduling scheme is proposed, which performs the de-blocking filter operation for a macro-block with very small buffer.4. Both the hardware and software of this de-blocking filter structure is implemented.5. The design is verified and synthesized, and software and hardware co-simulation is also performed for it. The result shows that it works correctly and effectively.