An Area-Efficient VLSI Architecture for High-Throughput Computation of the 2-D DWT

In this article, an area-efficient VLSI architecture scheme for high-throughput computation of the 2-D discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is proposed, effectively applied in the context of aircraft cargo hold scenes. The proposed architecture aims to reduce computation and storage resources while maintaining the DWT-IDWT reconstructed image quality for the 9/7 discrete wavelet. The hardware implementation formulae based on the flipping architecture have been modified to reduce RAM storage bit width. By transforming the coefficients of the formula into hardware-friendly values, the required multiplication operations are split into two stages of addition. On this basis, a pipelined architecture is constructed to set the critical path delay (CPD) of the architecture to be close to the delay of a single adder, T-a, thereby achieving a high throughput. Compared to existing architectures in the research field, the proposed single-level 2-D DWT architecture achieves resource savings on the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) platform while ensuring good image reconstruction quality. The advantages of the multilevel 2-D DWT are even more pronounced. In the simulation results on the application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) platform, the proposed architecture reduces computation time by at least 35.54% while achieving a higher level of decomposition, decreases the area-delay product (ADP) by at least 25.41%, and saves a significant amount of energy per image (EPI). Furthermore, the proposed folded architecture achieves close to 100% hardware utilization efficiency (HUE) in multilevel 2-D DWT computations.