Data-path and memory error compensation technique for low power JPEG implementation

This paper presents a novel technique to mitigate effects of data-path and memory errors in JPEG implementations. These errors are mainly caused by voltage scaling and process variation in scaled technologies. We characterize the data-path and memory errors and derive a probability distribution of the total number of errors. We propose an algorithm-specific technique that corrects most errors after quantization in the JPEG encoder by exploiting the characteristics of the quantized coefficients. The technique achieves high performance with small circuit overhead. Simulation results show that the proposed technique has a PSNR performance degradation of around 1.5 dB compared to the error-free case, and 4 dB improvement compared to the no correction case at compression rate of 0.75 bpp when BER = 10^-4.