Implementação de métrica de avaliação objetiva de qualidade de vídeo digital em lógica reconfigurável

Abstract

It is implemented in hardware an objective digital video evaluation method, using the VHDL language. As a computationally expensive process in software, it is investigated its implementation in a hardware platform. The implemented method, named NRVQA-LM, employs six spatio-temporal features extracted from different videos in order to obtain a quality score. These features are studied and the implementation is designed to be developed in an optimized way, in order to explore the benefits of reprogammable logic platforms, such as FPGAs. During the development it was necessary to study non-recurrent tools of the VHDL language, such as fixed- and floating-point arithmetics and the writing of math functions. Results shows high correlation between the calculated scores of the hardware and the original software implementations. The hardware implementation revealed to be highly resource expensive, mainly due the need of storing a whole video frame, but efficient in time, thanks to the parallelism feature of FPGA devices, executing quality score calculations between 20 and 40 times faster than a high-level language such as MATLAB. The fixed-point arithmetics revealed to be more efficient than the floating-point, specially regarding operation frequency.