Efficient Hardware Design for the AV1 CDEF Filter Targeting 4K UHD Videos

Developed by the AOMedia industry consortium, the AOM Video 1 (AV1) is an open-source and royalty-free video encoder released in June 2018. The Constrained Directional Enhancement Filter (CDEF) is one of the three AV1 in-loop filters and it is the focus of this work. The CDEF has the goal to reduce ringing artifacts generated with the encoding process, acting as a directional deringing filter. This paper presents a hardware design for the AV1 CDEF targeting real-time processing of 4K Ultra High Definition (UHD) videos. The architecture was synthesized to ASIC using the 40nm TSMC library, requiring 185 kgates and with a power dissipation of 43 mW when running at 93 MHz, reaching the frame rate of 60 frames per second (fps). To the best of the author's knowledge, there is no other work in the literature with dedicated hardware design for the AV1 CDEF.