Design and Implementation of Gray-Coded Bit-Plane Based Reconfigurable Motion Estimation Architecture Using Binary Content Addressable Memory for Video Encoder

Abstract

Motion Estimation (ME) is the most power consuming module in the video encoder due to its high computational complex operations. So designing an efficient ME hardware without losing coding performance is a major challenge. This paper proposes a low-bit-depth ME technique based on Gray-Coded bit-planes and its hardware implementation using Binary Content Addressable Memory (BCAM). The proposed method significantly reduces the computational burden due to its low-bit-depth representation. The novel BCAM based ME hardware provides faster results because of its on-chip memory computation without compromising other performance parameters. It can process 8K @53.71 fps operated at maximum frequency of 155 MHz with 152.78K NAND equivalent gate count using 90 nm technology library.