Real-time 4x4 intraframe prediction architecture for a H.264 decoder

Abstract

Multimedia systems need each time more video quality in order to respond new demands of video conferencing, digital TV, video storage, etc. At the same time and conflictingly, the need of better network/bandwidth utilization increases. To answer both demands, H.264/AVC was developed. This new video coding standard, accepted internationally, has a huge compression rate what make possible the transmission of very high quality videos over the actual frequency bandwidth or four parallel channels with standard resolution. One of its improvements over previous standards that make this excellent compression rate possible is the intraframe prediction module. This paper presents a hardware implementation of a 4x4 intraframe prediction decoder. Despite the computational complexity of the standard and the constraints needed to compress high quality video, the presented architecture is able to decode HDTV (1920 x 1080 pixels) in real-time.