Customisable core-based architectures for real-time motion estimation on FPGAs

This paper proposes new core-based architectures. for motion estimation that are customisable for different coding parameters and hardware resources. These new cores are derived from an efficient and fully parameterisable 2-D single array systolic structure for full-search block-matching motion estimation and inherit its configurability properties in what concerns the macroblock dimension, the search area and parallelism level. The proposed architectures require significantly fewer hardware resources, by reducing the spatial and pixel resolutions rather than restricting the set of considered candidate motion vectors. Low-cost and low-power regular architectures suitable for field programmable logic implementation are obtained without compromising the quality of the coded video sequences. Experimental results show that despite the significant complexity level presented by motion estimation processors, it is still possible to implement fast and low-cost versions of the original core-based architecture using general purpose FPGA devices.