A high throughput hardware architecture for deblocking filter in HEVC

This paper presents a high throughput hardware architecture for deblocking filter in high efficiency video coding (H.265/HEVC) standard. The architecture uses an efficient hybrid pipelining and parallel processing techniques for intra encoder. A single edge filter is designed to process both horizontal and vertical filtering of pixels one after the other respectively. In our proposed architecture, the video frame is divided into 32 x 32 blocks and each block is processed by splitting them into blocks of 8 x 32 pixels in a pipelined manner. Parallel processing is employed for filtering the edges which helped in improving the throughput by decreasing the processing clock cycles. It has been observed that the largest coding tree unit block that the hardware architecture can process is 64 x 64 pixels and can be achieved in 64 clock cycles. Synthesis results of the Verilog design for the proposed architecture using application specific integrated circuit 180 nm standard cell library shows that it consumes 102k 2-input NAND gates and can work at a maximum clock frequency of 250 MHz. The proposed design is capable of supporting 8k ultra high definition video sequences at 322 Frames Per Second (fps) which is the best among the existing present-day architectures.