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A real-time motion estimation FPGA architecture

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Abstract

A motion estimation architecture allowing the execution of a variety of block-matching search techniques is presented in this paper. The ability to choose the most efficient search technique with respect to speeding up the process and locating the best matching target block leads to the improvement of the quality of service and the performance of the video encoding. The proposed architecture is pipelined to efficiently support a large set of currently used block-matching algorithms including Diamond Search, 3-step, MVFAST and PMVFAST. The proposed design executes the algorithms by providing a set of instructions common for all the block-matching algorithms and a few instructions accommodating the specific actions of each technique. Moreover, the architecture supports the use of different search techniques at the block level. The results and performance measurements of the architecture have been validated on FPGA supporting maximum throughput of 30 frames/s with frame size 1,024 × 768.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been supported in part by the PAVET 05-181 project of the Greek General Secretariat for Information Systems.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Electronics Laboratory, Department of Physics, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece

    Konstantinos Babionitakis, George Lentaris, Kostantinos Nakos, Dionysios Reisis & Nikolaos Vlassopoulos

  2. Global Digital Technologies S.A., Athens, Greece

    Gregory A. Doumenis, George Georgakarakos & Ioannis Sifnaios

Authors
  1. Konstantinos Babionitakis
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  2. Gregory A. Doumenis
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  3. George Georgakarakos
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  4. George Lentaris
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  5. Kostantinos Nakos
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  6. Dionysios Reisis
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  7. Ioannis Sifnaios
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  8. Nikolaos Vlassopoulos
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Correspondence to Dionysios Reisis.

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Babionitakis, K., Doumenis, G.A., Georgakarakos, G. et al. A real-time motion estimation FPGA architecture. J Real-Time Image Proc 3, 3–20 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11554-007-0070-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11554-007-0070-9

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