Aiding to Multimedia Accelerators: A Hardware Design for Efficient Rounding of Binary Floating Point Numbers

Hardware accelerators for multimedia applications such as JPEG image compression and video compression are quite popular due to their capability of enhancing overall performance and system throughput. The core of essentially all lossy compression techniques is the quantization process. In the quantization process, rounding is performed to obtain integer values for the compressed images and video frames. The recent studies in the photo forensic research has revealed that the direct rounding e.g. round up or round down of floating point numbers results into some compression artifacts such as 'JPEG dimples'. Therefore in the compression process, performing rounding to the nearest integer value is important especially for High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography and videography. Since rounding to the nearest integer is a data-intensive process, hence its realization as a dedicated hardware is imperative to enhance overall performance. This paper presents a novel high performance hardware architecture for performing rounding of binary floating point numbers to the nearest integer. Additionally, an optimized version of the basic hardware design is also proposed. The proposed optimized version provides 6.7% reduction in area and 7.4% reduction in power consumption in comparison to the proposed basic architecture. Furthermore, the integration of the proposed floating point rounding hardware with the design flow of the computing kernel of the compression processor is also discussed in the paper. The proposed rounding hardware architecture and the integrated design with the computing kernel of compression process have been implemented on an Intel FPGA. The average resource overhead due to this integration is reported to be less than 1%.