Motion Estimation Co-processor Research Articles

High performance architecture for real-time HDTV broadcasting

A novel full search motion estimation co-processor architecture design is presented in this paper. The proposed architecture efficiently reuses search area data to minimize memory I/O while fully utilizing the hardware resources. A smart processing element (PE) and an efficient simple internal memory are the main components of the proposed co-processor. An efficient algorithm is used for loading both the current block and the search area inside the PE array. The search area data flow horizontally while the current block data are stationary. As a result, the speed of the co-processor is improved in terms of the throughput and the operating frequency compared to the state-of-the-art techniques. A smart local memory and PE design guarantees a simple and a regular data flow. The design of the local memory is implemented using only registers and a simple counter. This simplifies the design by avoiding the use of complicated addressing to write or read into/from the local memory. The proposed architecture is implemented using both the FPGA and the ASIC flow design tools. For a search range of 32 × 32 and block size of 16 × 16, the architecture can perform motion estimation for 30 fps of HDTV video at 350 MHz and easily outperforms many fast full search architectures.

Design, synthesis and verification of a smart imaging core using SystemC

In this paper the development of a smart imaging core following a SystemC-based design flow is presented. The smart imaging core integrates an ARM processor and two specific hardware blocks for image processing: a smart imaging coprocessor and a motion estimation coprocessor. A SystemC-based design flow is applied, comprising the design, synthesis and verification and synthesis of the two coprocessors, as well as the development and integration of the embedded software on the smart imaging core. The two coprocessors are successfully modeled and refined from C/C++-based algorithmic descriptions down to architecture reference models using SystemC and TLM concepts. For the RTL implementation of the coprocessor hardware high-level synthesis tools are used. The applied SystemC-based design flow enabled the iterative refinement of the architecture towards an optimal RTL implementation. Furthermore, the use of SystemC TLM supports the integration of fast functional models of the coprocessors on a virtual prototype platform of the target architecture. This virtual prototype is beneficially used during the embedded software development phase.

An innovative, high quality and search window independent motion estimation algorithm and architecture for MPEG-2 encoding

This paper describes an innovative, pipelined, cache-based architecture for a motion estimation coprocessor. The coprocessor is based on a predictive/recursive algorithm whose computational complexity is low and not dependent on the search window. The synergies between the architecture and algorithm's features allow a high quality, low-area, low-bandwidth, search window implementation for standard resolution (PAL/NTSC), low resolution (CIF/QCIF) or high resolution (ATSC) sequences.