Real-time 2-D wavelet transform implementation for HDTV compression

Recent advances in image analysis have shown that the application of 2-D discrete biorthogonal wavelet transform (DBWT) to digital image compression overcomes some of the barriers imposed by block-based transform coding algorithms while offering significant advantages in terms of coding gain, quality, natural compatibility with video formats requiring lower-resolution and graceful performance degradation when compressing at low bit rates. This paper reports on the design and field programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation of a non-separable 2-D DBWT architecture which is the heart of the proposed high-definition television (HDTV) compression system. The architecture adopts periodic symmetric extension at the image boundaries, therefore it conforms the JPEG-2000 standard. It computes the DBWT decomposition of an N×N image in approximately 2N2/3 clock cycles (ccs). Hardware implementation results based on a Xilinx Virtex-2000E FPGA chip showed that the processing of 2-D DBWT can be performed at 105 MHz providing a complete solution for the real-time computation of 2-D DBWT for HDTV compression.