JPEG hardware accelerator design for FPGA

A fully pipelined JPEG hardware accelerator that runs on FPGA is presented. The accelerator is designed interactively in a simulation environment, using a DSP hardware design automation tool chain. The encoder part of the accelerator accepts 8×8 image blocks in a streaming fashion, and outputs the zigzag-scanned, quantized 2-D DCT coefficients of the block. The decoder part accepts zigzag-scanned, quantized DCT coefficients, and outputs reconstructed 8×8 image block. Each part has a throughput of one system clock per pixel per channel. The encoder employs a fast pipelined implementation for 2-D DCT [1]. For the decoder, a new pipelined 2-D IDCT structure is developed. Our IDCT structure is based on an IDCT factorization for software implementation [2], and is inspired by the pipelined DCT structure employed in the encoder. The resource utilization and maximum frequency figures for a particular FPGA target suggest that our accelerator has competitive performance.