uvgKvazaarHW: Open-Source Hardware HEVC Intra Encoder

The widespread deployment of modern video coding technologies calls for efficient implementations that are made available to the entire video coding community. This paper presents the first known open-source hardware (HW) encoder implementation for High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265). Our encoder, named uvgKvazaarHW, is developed from the Kvazaar open-source software encoder. The current version of uvgKvazaarHW supports all normative HEVC intra coding tools with previously proven real-time encoding speed of up to 4K resolution on an Arria10 PCIe FPGA. It is implemented using High-level Synthesis (HLS) tool called Catapult. The open-source Kactus2 tool has been used to create component descriptions that follow the IP-XACT standard for better modularity, reusability, and downstream integration. The open-source repository of uvgKvazaarHW includes HLS synthesis-ready source codes and a SystemC simulation framework using Verilator for validation and development.