Quarter-pel Interpolation Architecture in H.264/AVC Decoder

In this paper, to reduce the computation amount of the quarter-pel interpolation in H.264 motion compensation, two-step interpolation approach is proposed: the first step is the half-pel interpolation and the other is the quarter-pel interpolation using the previous results. The quarter-pel interpolation is performed selectively according to the motion vector. The half-pel interpolation can be performed by simple row shift operation of the data stored in the register. Therefore, the proposed approach can be implemented as an simple hardware architecture which can perform a fast interpolation enough to process high-definition videos.