High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard is now becoming one of the most widespread video coding standards in the world. As a successor of H.264 standard, it aims to provide a much superior encoding performance. To fulfill this goal, several new notations along with the corresponding computation processes are introduced by this standard. Among those computation processes, the integer motion estimation (IME) is one of bottlenecks due to the complex partitions of the inter prediction units (PU) and the large search window commonly adopted. Many algorithms have been proposed to address this issue and usually put emphasis on a large search window and great computation amount. However, the coding efforts should be related to the scenes. To be more specific, for relatively static videos, a small search window along with a simple search scheme should be adopted to reduce the time cost and power consumption. In view of this, a micro-code-based IME engine is proposed in this paper, which could be applied with search schemes of different complexity. To test the performance, three different search schemes based on this engine are designed and evaluated under HEVC test model (HM) 16.9, achieving a B-D rate increase of 0.55/-0.07/-0.14%. Compared with our previous work, the hardware implementation is optimized to reduce 64.2% of the SRAMs bits and 32.8% of the logic gate count. The final design could support 4K×2K @139/85/37fps videos @500MHz.

In the newly finalized video coding standard, namely high efficiency video coding (HEVC), new notations like coding unit (CU), prediction unit (PU) and transformation unit (TU) are introduced to improve the coding performance. As a result, the reconstruction loop in intra encoding is heavily burdened to choose the best partitions or modes for them. In order to solve the bottleneck problems in cycle and hardware cost, this paper proposed a high-throughput and compact implementation for such a reconstruction loop. By “high-throughput”, it refers to that it has a fixed throughput of 32 pixel/cycle independent of the TU/PU size (except for 4×4 TUs). By “compact”, it refers to that it fully explores the reusability between discrete cosine transform (DCT) and inverse discrete cosine transform (IDCT) as well as that between quantization (Q) and de-quantization (IQ). Besides the contributions made in designing related hardware, this paper also provides a universal formula to analyze the cycle cost of the reconstruction loop and proposed a parallel-process scheme to further reduce the cycle cost. This design is verified on the Stratix IV FPGA. The basic structure achieved a maximum frequency of 150MHz and a hardware cost of 64K ALUTs, which could support the real time TU/PU partition decision for 4K×2K@20fps videos.

The neural network has been one of the most useful techniques in the area of speech recognition, language translation and image analysis in recent years. Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), a popular type of recurrent neural networks (RNNs), has been widely implemented on CPUs and GPUs. However, those software implementations offer a poor parallelism while the existing hardware implementations lack in configurability. In order to make up for this gap, a highly configurable 7.62 GOP/s hardware implementation for LSTM is proposed in this paper. To achieve the goal, the work flow is carefully arranged to make the design compact and high-throughput; the structure is carefully organized to make the design configurable; the data buffering and compression strategy is carefully chosen to lower the bandwidth without increasing the complexity of structure; the data type, logistic sigmoid (σ) function and hyperbolic tangent (tanh) function is carefully optimized to balance the hardware cost and accuracy. This work achieves a performance of 7.62 GOP/s @ 238 MHz on XCZU6EG FPGA, which takes only 3K look-up table (LUT). Compared with the implementation on Intel Xeon E5-2620 CPU @ 2.10GHz, this work achieves about 90× speedup for small networks and 25× speed-up for large ones. The consumption of resources is also much less than that of the state-of-the-art works.