A flexible hardware JPEG 2000 decoder for digital cinema

Descampe, Antonin [UCL] Devaux, Francois-Olivier Rouvroy, Gael Legat, Jean-Didier [UCL] Quisquater, Jean-Jacques [UCL] Macq, Benoît [UCL]

The image compression standard JPEG 2000 proposes a large set of features that is useful for today's multimedia applications. Unfortunately, it is much more complex than older standards. Real-time applications, such as digital cinema, require a specific, secure, and scalable hardware implementation. In this paper, a decoding scheme is proposed with two main characteristics. First, the complete scheme takes place in a field-programmable gate array without accessing any external memory, allowing integration in a secured system. Second, a customizable level of parallelization allows to satisfy a broad range of constraints, depending on the signal resolution. The resulting architecture is therefore ready to meet up-coming digital cinema specifications.