VLSI Design and Implementation of Adaptive Deblocking Filter for HEVC

Deblocking filtering plays a crucial role in high efficiency video coding (HEVC) by effectively enhancing the subjective quality of encoded images. It is one of the important means to improve overall video encoding performance. To address the high complexity associated with deblocking filtering technology in HEVC hardware encoders, in order to save resource consumption, reduced processing cycles, and improved filtering efficiency, a hardware algorithm and VLSI architecture for an adaptive deblocking filter in HEVC is proposed. First, based on the boundary rules of HEVC coding structure, a fast boundary judgment algorithm without recursive loop calculation is proposed to reduce the complexity of hardware implementation. Furthermore, based on the above boundary judgment results, a four-stage pipeline structure that can independently select the filter boundary for deblocking filtering is proposed to reduce the filter processing cycle. Finally, the luma and chroma components are filtered in parallel, utilizing a highly parallel and compatible shared memory architecture. This design not only enhances filtering efficiency but also minimizes memory resource consumption. Experimental results demonstrate that the hardware area of the designed deblock filtering structure is about 60% less than that of the existing structure under the TSMC90 nm process, and the maximum working frequency can reach 250 MHz, which can meet the real-time encoding of 8K@60 fps ultra-high-definition video.