This paper proposes a novel memory reference reduction method for vector-radix 2D DCT pruning.This method aims to reduce the memory reference owing to weighting factors and signal input.The proposed method merges the butterflies at every neighboring two stages in the computation diagram

and then computes them with fewer weighting factors.Hardware platform based on general purpose processor is used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method for vector-radix 2-D FCT pruning implementation.Experimental results validate the benefits of the proposed method with less clock cycle

less memory reference

and fewer memory space compared with the conventional implementation.