Implementation of a new adaptive color transform unit for Tico's integration proposal in A-DSC

Over the years, the video content quality has been in perpetual improvement. The video standards have now to tackle the arrival of new ultra-high definition contents, creating a big increase of the bit rate and having huge impacts on the video transmission and its storage. To cope with this problem, VESA developed A-DSC, a visually lossless standard proposing a high compression ratio. The resulting bit rate would be low enough to still operate on the existing physical supports. This master's thesis aims at proposing Tico, the compression standard of intoPIX, as part of the A-DSC solution. The project first aimed at integrating Tico in Qualcomm’s solution for A-DSC. Preliminary results shown that the current version of Tico is not well-adapted to provide good performance. The work is delayed to study an adaptive color transform unit to integrate in order to enhance its performance. A theoretical solution of the unit is first proposed. Then, a RTL architecture is discussed before performing the high-level synthesis of the design in order to integrate it on FPGA. The unit selects an optimal color space in a set of 12 simple invertible and lossless color transforms. The selection is performed with a range criterion, that is shown to correlates the best to Tico's encoder budget. It is based on a simple architecture necessitating a small resource allocation, even for a multiple pixel per cycle solution. However, Tico is shown to not operate well on small sized pixels blocks, providing sub-optimal results on such blocks.