An efficient genetic encoding scheme for multiplierless color space converter design

Color space conversion has become a very important role in image and video processing systems. To speed up some processing processes, many communication and multimedia video compression schemes use luminance-chrominance type color spaces, such as YCbCr or YUV, making a mechanism for converting between different formats necessary. Therefore, techniques which efficiently implement this conversion are desired. For the recent years, a new field of research called Evolvable Hardware (EHW) has emerged which combines aspects of evolutionary computation with hardware design and synthesis. It is a new scheme inspired by natural evolution, for automatic design of hardware systems. This paper presents a novel evolutionary approach for efficient implementation of a RGB to YCbCr color space converter suitable for Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGAs) and VLSI. In the proposed method, we use the genetic algorithm to automatically evolve the multiplierless architecture of the color space converter. The architecture employs only a few shift and addition operations to replace the complex multiplications. The experimental results represent that the performance of implemented architecture is good at RGB to YCbCr color space converting, and it also has the advantages of high-speed, low-complexity, and low-area.