Design and Implementation of an Efficient Multi-Pattern Motion Estimation Search Algorithm for HEVC/H.265

Abstract

Motion Estimation (ME) is the most computationally intensive block in high efficiency video coding (HEVC) due to its complex partition schemes. It consumes a large amount of power in the encoder. So designing a ME module on hardware platform imposes significant challenges. Many hardware oriented integer ME (IME) algorithms have been proposed in the literature to meet the challenges but suffer from coding efficiency degradation. In this paper we propose a low complexity IME algorithm and its hardware implementation. The proposed algorithm has been shown for two different pattern structures (PS) with 38 search points. It achieves bjontegaard bitrate (BD-BR) of 0.5% decrease and 0.077% increase for two PSs compared to test zone search (TZS) in HM 16.8. It results 8.725% and 9.072% saving in encoding time respectively. The proposed architecture supports all the HEVC partitions. It provides real time encoding of 4096 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> 2160 @60 fps operated at the maximum frequency of 353 MHz with 1591 K NAND equivalent gate count and 8.32 kB on chip memory using 90 nm technology library. Therefore, it can be used in consumer electronics applications such as security surveillance, video recording systems etc. that require high efficient HEVC encoder.