Optimized VLSI Architecture of HEVC Fractional Pixel Interpolators with Approximate Computing

Abstract

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the latest video standard developed by the Joint Video Exploration Team. HEVC is able to offer better compression results than preceding standards but it suffers from a high computational complexity. In particular, one of the most time consuming blocks in HEVC is the fractional-sample interpolation filter, which is used in both the encoding and the decoding processes. Integrating different state-of-the-art techniques, this paper presents an architecture for interpolation filters, able to trade quality for energy and power efficiency by exploiting approximate interpolation filters and by halving the amount of required memory with respect to state-of-the-art implementations.