Low-power and high-throughput design of fast motion estimation VLSI architecture for multimedia system-on-chip design

• US 8,184,709 B2
• Filed: 07/18/2009
• Issued: 05/22/2012
• Est. Priority Date: 10/14/2008
• Status: Expired due to Fees

• Current Assignee: National Taiwan University (Government of The Republic of China)
• Original Assignee: National Taiwan University (Government of The Republic of China)
• Inventors: Kuo, Sy-Yen, Huang, Shih-Chia
• Primary Examiner(s): Dastouri, Mehrdad
• Assistant Examiner(s): Anderson, II, James
• Application Number:
  US12/505,468
• Publication Number:
  US 20100091863A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,039 Days
• Field of Search: None
• US Class Current: 375/240.16
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 19/433 characterised by techniques for memory access
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 19/513 Processing of motion vectors
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 19/56 Motion estimation with initialisation of the vector search, e.g. estimating a good candidate to initiate a search

Abstract

A method of fast motion estimation in VLSI architecture with low-power and high-throughput for multimedia System-on-Chip design is disclosed. The method uses the data prediction and data reuse technique to find out the best matching block within the search range of the reference frame for the target block in the current frame in order to obtain the respective motion vector. The external memory bandwidth and the internal memory size in the video coding system are significantly reduced so as to speed up the process of motion estimation and most of the power consumption for the motion estimation process is further saved in the embedded video coding systems.

Claims

1. A method of fast motion estimation, comprising:

retrieving a motion information of a current block of a current frame from a coding information;

setting up a fast prediction plane according to correlated motion vectors of neighboring blocks of the current block, wherein the fast prediction plane is determined according to the following;

2. The method of fast motion estimation according to claim 1, wherein the BMA determines a minimum value of a sum of absolute differences (SAD), as the best matching block, the SAD being defined by the equation of

3. The method of fast motion estimation according to claim 1, wherein the coding information is contained in a standard coding protocol MPEG-4 or H.264 /AVC.

4. The method of fast motion estimation according to claim 1, wherein the coding information comprises motion vectors of a left block, an upper-left block, and an upper block, positioned at a left side, an upper-left side, and an upper side of the current block, respectively.

5. The method of fast motion estimation according to claim 1, wherein the best matching algorithm comprises a diamond search algorithm, and the diamond search algorithm selects a center point of the current block, and four points positioned at an upper side, a left side, a lower side, and right side of the center point serving as five search comparison points for search comparison.

6. The method of fast motion estimation according to claim 1, wherein during loading image data designated by the predictive search path from an external memory saving image data of a search range of a reference frame to an internal memory, image data of two overlapped search paths of two horizontal adjacent blocks previously loaded in the internal memory is re-used based on the predictive path.