Pyramid Architecture for 3840 X 2160 Quad Full High Definition 30 Frames/s Video Acquisition

• Published in: IEEE transactions on circuits and systems for video technology 2010-11, Vol.20 (11), p.1499-1508
• Main Authors: CHAO, Wei-Min, CHEN, Liang-Gee
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Architecture; Buffers; Camcorder; Charge coupled devices; Charge transfer devices; Computer architecture; Design. Technologies. Operation analysis. Testing; Digital cameras; digital image processing pipeline; digital still camera; Electronics; Exact sciences and technology; Frames; High definition; high definition video; Image color analysis; Image processing; Image resolution; Imaging devices; Information, signal and communications theory; Integrated circuits; Pipelines; Pyramids; Semiconductor electronics. Microelectronics. Optoelectronics. Solid state devices; Semiconductors; Signal processing; Signal processing algorithms; Streaming media; Telecommunications and information theory; VLSI architecture
• ISSN: 1051-8215; 1558-2205
• DOI: 10.1109/TCSVT.2010.2077770

Image pipeline processing is crucial to generating high quality images in applications using complementary metaloxide-semiconductor (CMOS)/charge-coupled device sensors. The on-chip line buffer normally dominates the total area and power dissipation due to the needed filter window buffering. As image resolution and filter support increase, the area and power requirement increase accordingly. This paper presents a novel pyramid architecture to efficiently process a system that the image pipeline is between an image sensor and video coding engine. By utilizing the features of the pyramid structure and block-based video/image encoders, the proposed architecture is scalable from low to high image resolution and filter size. The input image is first partitioned into floors of tiles to reduce the frame line buffer. Two computing schemes, immediate result reuse and vertical snack scan, are utilized to reduce the overlapping redundant computations. A 90 nm CMOS chip design with 7 × 5 filter support for 3840 × 2160 quad full high definition video at 30 frames/s is designed to demonstrate the performance of power and area efficiency. Compared with traditional architectures with frame line buffers, the proposed design has shown that the power consumption is reduced by 25% to 108 mW from 145 mW. The chip area is reduced by 65% to 309 K from 888 K logic gates. The external memory bandwidth increases to 8286 Mbit/s from 5972 Mbit/s for YUV4:2:0, from 7963 Mbit/s for YUV4:2:2, and is reduced by 30% from 11944 Mbit/s for YUV4:4:4.