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VLSI Architecture Design of Fractional Motion Estimation for H.264/AVC

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Abstract

The H.264/AVC Fractional Motion Estimation (FME) with rate-distortion constrained mode decision can improve the rate-distortion efficiency by 2–6 dB in peak signal-to-noise ratio. However, it comes with considerable computation complexity. Acceleration by dedicated hardware is a must for real-time applications. The main difficulty for FME hardware implementation is parallel processing under the constraint of the sequential flow and data dependency. We analyze seven inter-correlative loops extracted from FME procedure and provide decomposing methodologies to obtain efficient projection in hardware implementation. Two techniques, 4×4 block decomposition and efficiently vertical scheduling, are proposed to reuse data among the variable block size and to improve the hardware utilization. Besides, advanced architectures are designed to efficiently integrate the 6-taps 2D finite impulse response, residue generation, and 4×4 Hadamard transform into a fully pipelined architecture. This design is finally implemented and integrated into an H.264/AVC single chip encoder that supports realtime encoding of 720×480 30fps video with four reference frames at 81 MHz operation frequency with 405 K logic gates (41.9% area of the encoder).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. DSP/IC Design Lab., Graduate Institute of Electronics Engineering and Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University, 1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Rd., Taipei, 10617, Taiwan

    Yi-Hau Chen, Tung-Chien Chen, Shao-Yi Chien, Yu-Wen Huang & Liang-Gee Chen

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  1. Yi-Hau Chen
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  2. Tung-Chien Chen
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  4. Yu-Wen Huang
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Correspondence to Yi-Hau Chen.

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Chen, YH., Chen, TC., Chien, SY. et al. VLSI Architecture Design of Fractional Motion Estimation for H.264/AVC. J Sign Process Syst Sign Image Video Technol 53, 335–347 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-008-0213-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-008-0213-7

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