Hardware accelerator for the JPEG encoder on the xilinx SPARTAN 3 FPGA

The report detailing the Hardware Accelerator for the JPEG encoder is organized into three sections. First, it will review the processes of the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) encoding and decoding standard. Second, it will review three different implementations of the discrete cosine transform in hardware. This is a very computationally intensive element of the JPEG encoding process and the analysis of these designs covers the benefits and costs of the various approaches for the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) implementations. Finally, it will discuss this specific hardware accelerator design for a color state transformation for the standard JPEG encoder. An eight by eight matrix of Red, Green, Blue (RGB) values is passed into the FPGA as well as calculated in software. The Y Cr Cb results from that of the hardware accelerator implementation are compared with the software implementation for computational accuracy and the differences in computation time are sampled for a comparison. There is a clear 38% improvement in speed from the hardware accelerator.