Design of Low-Complexity Interpolator for Motion Compensation in H.264 decoder

The H.264 video coding standard is widely used due to the high compression rate and quality. The motion compensation is the most time-consuming and complex unit in the H.264 decoder. The performance of the motion compensation is determined by the calculation of pixel interpolation. The quarter-pixel interpolation is achieved using 6-tap horizontal or vertical FIR filters for luminance data and bilinear FIR filters for chroma data. We propose the architecture for interpolation of luminance and chroma data in H.264 decoders. It is composed of dual-channel pipelined processing elements and can interpolate integer-, halfand quarter-pixel data. The number of the processing cycles is different depending on the position. The processing elements are composed of adders and shifters to reduce the complexity while the accuracy of the pixel data are maintained. We design interpolators for luminance and chroma data using Verilog-HDL and verify the function and performance by implementing using an FPGA.