Exploring the power consumption of different motion estimation architectures for video compression

Power consumption is very critical for portable video applications. Motion estimation in the video encoder requires huge amount of computation and hence consumes the largest portion of power. This paper investigates the power consumption of different motion estimation architectures. Full search architectures were used as an example to illustrate the power consumption mechanism. The principle can be extended to other commonly used fast search architectures. The result of this study can serve as a guideline for the selection of the appropriate architecture for portable applications.