An algorithm and its architecture for half-pixel variable block size motion estimation

This paper presents an accurate half-pixel variable block size motion estimation algorithm and its hardware architecture. The proposed algorithm does not require interpolation of the reference frame pixels and has near performance to the conventional interpolation-search methods. These simplifications cause high level reduction in computational time and gate count without the need for internal or external half-pixel accuracy search memory. A simple, low latency, high throughput and fully utilized pipelined architecture of proposed algorithm is implemented in VHDL. The proposed hardware architecture uses shift registers for multiplication and pipelining technique and can support half-pixel accuracy variable block size motion estimation for the real time HDTV format (1920 x1280 resolution and 30 Frames/sec).