<title>Motion estimation architecture for MPEG-4</title>

Abstract

Visual Computing and Communications is becoming increasingly important with the advent of broadband networks and compression standards. The International Standards Organization is currently finalizing the MPEG-4 standard, which emphasizes object based coding and content manipulation in video sequences. There are essentially two kinds of redundancies in a video sequence, namely spatial and temporal. The concept of video object planes (VOPs) has been introduced in MPEG-4, which allows for manipulation and coding of the various video objects. The temporal correlation in the VOPs is exploited by employing motion estimation/compensation process similar to the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 standards. However, there are some enhancements to that of the MPEG-4 motion estimation procedure particularly in terms of the padding. Motion estimation process is applied to block sizes for both 8 X 8 and 16 X 16 pixels for the luminance component. In this paper, we propose design of flexible architectures for implementing scalable motion estimation and padding. The proposed architecture is modular and has a regular data flow and therefore can be implemented in VLSI.© (1999) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.