06075373

j

06075373 Lopes, Alba Sandyra Bezerra Silva, Ivan Saraiva Agostini, Luciano Volcan A memory hierarchy model based on data reuse for full-search motion estimation on high-definition digital videos. Int. J. Reconfig. Comput. 2012, Article ID 473725, 10 p. (2012). 2012 Hindawi Publishing Corporation, New York, NY EN

doi:10.1155/2012/473725

Summary: The motion estimation is the most complex module in a video encoder requiring a high processing throughput and high memory bandwidth, mainly when the focus is high-definition videos. The throughput problem can be solved increasing the parallelism in the internal operations. The external memory bandwidth may be reduced using a memory hierarchy. This work presents a memory hierarchy model for a full-search motion estimation core. The proposed memory hierarchy model is based on a data reuse scheme considering the full search algorithm features. The proposed memory hierarchy expressively reduces the external memory bandwidth required for the motion estimation process, and it provides a very high data throughput for the ME core. This throughput is necessary to achieve real time when processing high-definition videos. When considering the worst bandwidth scenario, this memory hierarchy is able to reduce the external memory bandwidth in 578 times. A case study for the proposed hierarchy, using $32 \times 32$ search window and $8 \times 8$ block size, was implemented and prototyped on a Virtex 4 FPGA. The results show that it is possible to reach 38 frames per second when processing full HD frames ($1920 \times 1080$ pixels) using nearly 299 Mbytes per second of external memory bandwidth.