A high throughput pass parallel block decoder architecture for JPEG 2000 that prevents stalling in the decoding process

摘要

The Block Decoder (BD) which is an indispensable component of the JPEG 2000 image compression standard has the highest computational complexity and determines the speed of the overall decoder system. This paper proposes a high throughput pass parallel BD architecture, which can decode more than one bit per clock cycle. In BD, the dependency between context generation and arithmetic decoding unit incorporates stalling and reduces the throughput of the decoding process. The proposed selective byte input and synchronous sample skipping techniques are used to prevent stalling in the decoding process. The proposed architecture achieves 86% more throughput with 50% increment in the hardware cost than that of the best available serial BD architecture. In comparison with the best available pass parallel architecture, throughput improves almost 8.2 times with 61% increment in the hardware cost. Incorporation of the speed up techniques in the design is the main reason for more hardware consumption. The Figure of Merit of the proposed design, which is the ratio of throughput and hardware cost, is more than that of the available BD architectures for typical code block (CB) size of 32 x 32. The ASIC implementation of the proposed design consumes 66 mW power at maximum operating frequency.