Three-dimensional discrete wavelet transform architectures

The three-dimensional (3-D) discrete wavelet transform (DWT) suits compression applications well, allowing for better compression on 3-D data as compared with two-dimensional (2-D) methods. This paper describes two architectures for the 3-D DWT, called the 3DW-I and the 3DW-II. The first architecture (3DW-I) is based on folding, whereas the 3DW-II architecture is block-based. Potential applications for these architectures include high definition television (HDTV) and medical data compression, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The 3DW-I architecture is an implementation of the 3-D DWT similar to folded 1-D and 2-D designs. It allows even distribution of the processing load onto 3 sets of filters, with each set performing the calculations for one dimension. The control for this design is very simple, since the data are operated on in a row-column-slice fashion. Due to pipelining, all filters are utilized 100% of the time, except for the start up and wind-down times. The 3DW-II architecture uses block inputs to reduce the requirement of on-chip memory. It has a central control unit to select which coefficients to pass on to the lowpass and highpass filters. The memory on the chip will be small compared with the input size since it depends solely on the filter sizes. The 3DW-I and 3DW-II architectures are compared according to memory requirements, number of clock cycles, and processing of frames per second. The two architectures described in this paper are the first 3-D DWT architectures.