A Flexible, Hardware JPEG 2000 Decoder for Digital Cinema Antonin Descampe, Student Member, IEEE, Franc ¸ois-Olivier Devaux, Student Member, IEEE, Ga¨ el Rouvroy, Student Member, IEEE, Jean-Didier Legat, Member, IEEE, Jean-Jacques Quisquater, Member, IEEE, and Benoˆ ıt Macq, Senior Member, IEEE Abstract The image compression standard JPEG 2000 proposes a large set of features, useful for today’s multimedia applications. Unfortunately, it is much more complex than older standards. Real-time appli- cations, such as Digital Cinema, require a specific, secure and scalable hardware implementation. In this paper, a decoding scheme is proposed with two main characteristics. First, the complete scheme takes place in an FPGA, without accessing any external memory, allowing integration in a secured system. Second, a customizable level of parallelization allows to satisfy a broad range of constraints, depending on the signal resolution. The resulting architecture is therefore ready to meet upcoming Digital Cinema specifications. Index Terms Arithmetic coding, bit-plane coding, Digital Cinema, JPEG 2000, line-based, wavelet transform. Manuscript received March 5, 2004. This paper was supported by the Walloon Region, Belgium, through the TACTILS project. A. Descampe, F.-O. Devaux and B. Macq are with the Communications and Remote Sensing Laboratory (TELE), Universit´ e catholique de Louvain (UCL), Belgium. E-mail: {descampe,devaux,macq}@tele.ucl.ac.be. G. Rouvroy, J.-D. Legat and J.-J. Quisquater are with the Microelectronics Laboratory (DICE), Universit´ e catholique de Louvain (UCL), Belgium. E-mail: {rouvroy,legat,jjq}@dice.ucl.ac.be. A. Descampe is funded by the Belgian NSF. March 3, 2006 DRAFT