A digital hardware fast algorithm and FPGA-based prototype for a novel 16-point approximate DCT for image compression applications

The discrete cosine transform (DCT) is the key step in many image and video coding standards. The eight-point DCT is an important special case, possessing several low-complexity approximations widely investigated. However, the 16-point DCT transform has energy compaction advantages. In this sense, this paper presents a new 16-point DCT approximation with null multiplicative complexity. The proposed transform matrix is orthogonal and contains only zeros and ones. The proposed transform outperforms the well-known Walsh–Hadamard transform and the current state-of-the-art 16-point approximation. A fast algorithm for the proposed transform is also introduced. This fast algorithm is experimentally validated using hardware implementations that are physically realized and verified on a 40 nm CMOS Xilinx Virtex-6 XC6VLX240T FPGA chip for a maximum clock rate of 342 MHz. Rapid prototypes on FPGA for a 8-bit input word size show significant improvement in compressed image quality by up to 1–2 dB at the cost of only eight adders compared to the state-of-art 16-point DCT approximation algorithm in the literature (Bouguezel et al 2010 Proc. 53rd IEEE Int. Midwest Symp. on Circuits and Systems). (paper)