An Ultra-Low Bandwidth Design Method for MPEG-2 to H.264/AVC Transcoding

Xianghui WEI  Takeshi IKENAGA  Satoshi GOTO 

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences  Vol.E92-A  No.4  pp.1072-1079
Publication Date: 2009/04/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1337
Print ISSN: 0916-8508
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Advanced Technologies Emerging Mainly from the 21st Workshop on Circuits and Systems in Karuizawa)
Category: 
Keyword: 
H.264,  MPEG-2,  transcoding,  motion estimation,  search window reuse, 

Full Text: PDF(726.7KB)

Summary: 
Motion estimation (ME) is a computation and data intensive module in video coding system. The search window reuse methods play a critical role in bandwidth reduction by exploiting the data locality in video coding system. In this paper, a search window reuse method (Level C+) is proposed for MPEG-2 to H.264/AVC transcoding. The proposed method is designed for ultra-low bandwidth application, while the on-chip memory is not a main constraining factor. By loading search window for the motion estimation unit (MEU) and applying motion vector clipping processing, each MB in MEU can utilize both horizontal and vertical search reuse. A very low bandwidth level (Rα<2) can be achieved with an acceptable on-chip memory.