High performance hardware architectures for one bit transform based motion estimation

Abstract

Motion estimation (ME) is the most computationally intensive part of video compression and video enhancement systems. One bit transform (1BT) based ME algorithms have low computational complexity. Therefore, in this paper, we propose high performance systolic hardware architectures for 1BT based fixed block size (FBS) and variable block size (VBS) ME. The proposed ME hardware architectures perform full search ME for 4 Macroblocks in parallel and they are faster than the 1BT based ME hardware reported in the literature. They use less on-chip memory than the previous 1BT based ME hardware by using a novel data reuse scheme and memory organization. The proposed VBS ME hardware is the first 1BT based ME hardware implementing VBS ME. The proposed hardware architectures are implemented in Verilog HDL. The FBS ME and VBS ME hardware consume %34 and %49 of the slices in a Xilinx XC2VP30-7 FPGA, respectively. They can work at 113 MHz in the same FPGA and are capable of processing 49 1920times1080 full High Definition frames per second. Therefore, they can be used in consumer electronics products that require real-time video processing or compression.