A New VLSI Architecture of a Hierarchical Motion Estimator for Low Bit-rate Video Coding

저전송률 동영상 압축을 위한 새로운 계층적 움직임 추정기의 VLSI 구조

We propose a new hierarchical motion estimator architecture that supports the advanced prediction mode of recent low bit-rate video coders such as H.263 and MPEG-4. In the proposed VLSI architecture, a basic searching unit (BSU) is commonly utilized for all hierarchical levels to make a systematic and small sized motion estimator. Since the memory bank of the proposed architecture provides scheduled data flow for calculating 8$\times$8 block-based sum of absolute difference (SAD), both a macroblock-based motion vector (MV) and four block-based MVs are simultaneously obtained for each macroblock in the advanced prediction mode. The proposed motion estimator gives similar coding performance compared with full search block matching algorithm (FSBMA) while achieving small size and satisfying the advanced prediction mode.