Design And Implementation Of H.264 Video Decoding Ip Core Based On Fpga

With people's increasing demands for video services, a new video coding standard H.264 with higher compression ratio is widely used. H.264, however, in order to obtain a better compression performance, has increased algorithm complexity. This has put higher requirements to the speed and flexibility of the processor. Combined with the advantages of ARM, DSP and ASIC, the SOPC technology will undoubtedly be widely used in the field of the high definition video communication.According to H.264 decoding algorithm characteristics, this paper proposed a new SOPC design scheme based on FPGA hard core and NiosII soft core provided by Altera. NiosII soft core is mainly responsible for the analysis of macroblock layer and above syntax element with less calculation amount. The macroblock layer decoding algorithm is implemented by a highly parallel structure hardware IP core because of its tremendous computational.The hardware IP core has an Avalon slave interface which used to communicate with Niosâ…¡CPU.The key improved technology of H.264 and coded bit stream data format are analyzed deeply in this paper. The overall decoding process and the hardware design of a number of functional modules involved in the process of the macroblock decoding, such as pre-processing module, intra-prediction module, CAVLC entropy decoding module and inverse quantization, anti-DCT transformation module are also introduced in detail.The improved schemes proposed according to each algorithm feature are also discussed in this paper. For example, we proposed a general computing model according to myriad intra prediction mode.We also proposed an optimized method of CAVLC table's looking up. The hardware application of entire pipeline parallel arithmetic inverse quantization, inverse DCT module is also an improved scheme.The system chose NiosII development board as testbench. Experimental results indicate that the H.264 decoding system based on SOPC technology has unique advantage in speed, cost, flexibility, function expansibility and so on. Moreover, the market prospects will also be very good if the existing systems can get further optimization and become a mature dedicated H.264 decoding chip.