A High-Throughput Hardware Design of a One-Dimensional SPIHT Algorithm

Video display systems include frame memory, which stores video data for display. To reduce system cost, video data are often compressed for storage in frame memory. A desirable characteristic for display memory compression is support for the raster-scan processing order and the fixed target compression ratio. Set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) is an efficient two-dimensional compression algorithm that guarantees a fixed target compression ratio, but its one-dimensional (1D) variation has received little attention, even though its 1D nature supports the raster-scan processing order. This paper proposes a novel hardware design for 1D SPIHT. The algorithm is modified to exploit parallelism for effective hardware implementation. For the encoder, dependences that prohibit parallel execution are resolved and a pipelined schedule is proposed. For the parallel execution of the decoder, the algorithm is modified to enable estimation of the bitstream length of each pass prior to decoding. This modification allows parallel and pipelined decoding operations, leading to a high-throughput design for both encoder and decoder. Although the modifications slightly decrease compression efficiency, additional optimizations are proposed to improve such efficiency. As a result, the peak signal-to-noise ratio drop is reduced from 1.40 dB to 0.44 dB. The throughputs of the proposed encoder and decoder are 7.04 Gbps and 7.63 Gbps, respectively, and their respective gate counts are 37.2 K and 54.1 K.