Design and Efficient FPGA Implementation of an RGB to YCrCb Color Space Converter Using Distributed Arithmetic

Processing an image in the RGB color space, with a set of RGB values for each pixel is not the most efficient method. To speed up some processing steps many video compression and communication techniques use luminance/chrominance color spaces, such as YCrCb, making a mechanism for converting between formats necessary. Therefore, techniques which efficiently implement this conversion are desired. This paper presents two novel architectures for efficient implementation of a Color Space Converter (CSC) suitable for Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGAs) and VLSI. The proposed architectures are based on Distributed Arithmetic (DA) ROM accumulator principles. The architectures have been implemented and verified using the Celoxica RC1000-PP FPGA development board. In addition, they are platform independent and have a low latency (8 cycles). The first architecture has a throughput of height, while the second one is fully pipelined and has a throughput of one and capable of sustained data rate of over 234 mega-conversions/seconds.