High-throughput implementation of lifting-based discrete wavelet transforms using look-ahead pipelining

We present a novel high-throughput very large scale integration implementation for a lifting-based discrete wavelet transform (DWT). First, an efficient parallel processing technique using look-ahead pipelining is investigated for implementation of 1-D DWT; then the scalable design respectively for the 1-D architecture and 2-D architecture is introduced. The proposed designs indicate that the delay registers of the 1-D architecture and the line buffers of the 2-D architecture do not increase proportionally to the amount of parallelism exploited, which is very meaningful to control increase of cost for 2-D high-speed implementation. The proposed 2-D architecture could complete one level of the decomposition transform for an NxN frame of an image in approximately NxN/(4IxJ) intraclock cycles, where the values of I and J could be set as arbitrary suitable positive integers. Compared with the previous similar methods, the proposed design could efficiently save hardware resources under the same throughput rate, and has more flexible scalability and simpler control complexity; thus, it could be an efficient alternative for high-speed applications. (C) 2010 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. [DOI: 10.1117/1.3497049]