Zhang Xuechao, Zhang Debiao, Guo Yangyang, Yang Jinyu, Cui Huijun
Accepted: 2026-11-03
To address the throughput limitations of pure software architectures in high-resolution video scaling, as well as the real-time deployment challenges of low-end FPGAs under the dual constraints of resources and bandwidth, this paper designs and implements a software-hardware co-designed real-time video accelerator that achieves a three-dimensional trade-off among resource utilization, latency, and image quality while guaranteeing real-time performance. First, at the system architecture level, a streaming acceleration architecture with low-resolution storage and on-chip real-time high-resolution reconstruction is constructed, where 3-line BRAM rotational buffering and a single-clock-domain pipeline are used to process pixels in a streaming manner, so that the off-chip DDR only buffers 720p source frames, thereby reducing the external memory access bandwidth requirement. Second, on the operator-mapping level, a fixed-point-domain single-point rounding compensation is adopted to eliminate the systematic grayscale bias caused by the accumulated truncation during the shift-based normalization in 8-bit fixed-point processing. Finally, system-level verification is carried out on a Zynq-7010 SoC. In real-time 720p-to-1080p upsampling, the hardware acceleration core occupies only about 1288 LUTs, achieves a 20.27 times speedup in single-frame processing over the ARM processor, and delivers an output PSNR of 40.02 dB. With low logic overhead, the proposed method reconciles low latency with image quality, providing a reusable design paradigm for the hardware mapping and engineering deployment of image algorithms on low-end FPGAs.