Approximate Lifting 2-D DWT Hardware Design for Image Encoder of Wireless Visual Sensors

In this article, a novel approximate hybrid multiplier design is proposed to reduce the data-path width of lifting 2-D discrete wavelet transform (DWT) especially for wireless visual sensor node applications. The proposed multiplier design takes multiplier operand of size less by 3 bit and calculates full-width outputs with marginal loss of accuracy, which is significant. A parallel approximate lifting 2-D DWT structure is derived using the proposed multiplier design. The proposed approximate 2-D DWT structure uses data-path width 9 and 11 for the first and second DWT levels and produces reconstructed color images higher than the 70-dB peak-signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). Compared with the existing fractional wavelet transform (FrWT)-based 2-D DWT structures, the proposed structure has a smaller data-path width and free from overhead. The proposed structure has equal or marginally higher ON-chip memory requirement than the existing FrWT-based 2-D DWT structures, but involves a substantially less area–delay product (ADP) and energy per image (EPI). The ADP and EPI reduction is ${O}{(}{10}^{{2}}\times {)}$ . Compared with the existing parallel structure based on hybrid approximate radix-4 and radix-8 encoded Booth multiplier, the proposed approximate structure involves nearly 23% less ADP and 22% less EPI and calculates output images with nearly (4–7)-dB higher PSNR.