Block-pipelining cache for motion compensation in high definition H.264/AVC video decoder

In this paper, we present a cache scheme targeting hardware implementation to reduce the bandwidth of motion compensation, and a block-pipelining strategy to hide long latency of the external memory in high definition H.264/AVC video decoder. Hardware architecture is also implemented for the proposed algorithms. Experimental results show that the cache succeeds in reducing external memory bandwidth of motion compensation by 66%~78% and the block-pipelining strategy can solve the latency problem better than previous solutions. Our proposed hardware architecture can averagely process one macroblock within 297 cycles, capable of real-time processing 1920times1088@30 fps H.264 sequence at lower than 80 MHz.