Optimized 2-D SAD Tree Architecture of Integer Motion Estimation for H.264/AVC

Yibo FAN  Xiaoyang ZENG  Satoshi GOTO  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Electronics   Vol.E94-C   No.4   pp.411-418
Publication Date: 2011/04/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1353
DOI: 10.1587/transele.E94.C.411
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Circuits and Design Techniques for Advanced Large Scale Integration)
Category: 
Keyword: 
IME,  VBSME,  2-D SAD tree,  H.264,  

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Summary: 
Integer Motion Estimation (IME) costs much computation in H.264/AVC video encoder. 2-D SAD tree IME architecture provides very high performance for encoder, and it has been used by many video codec designs. This paper proposes an optimized hardware design of 2-D SAD tree IME. Firstly, a new hardware architecture is proposed to reduce on-chip memory size. Secondly, a new search pattern is proposed to fully use memory bandwidth and reduce external memory access. Thirdly, the data-path is redesigned, and the performance is greatly improved. In order to compare with other IME designs, an IME design support D1 size, 30 fps with search range [32, 32] is implemented. The hardware cost of this design includes 118 KGates and 8 Kb SRAM, the maximum clock frequency is 200 MHz. Compared to the original 2-D SAD tree IME, our design saves 87.5% on-chip memory, and achieves 3 times performance than original one. Our design provides a new way to design a low cost and high performance IME for H.264/AVC encoder.