«Motion Estimation Accelerator with User Search Strategy in an RVC Context»

Motion estimation represents a key module in video compression. The RVC context requires proposing a flexible solution for motion estimation. According to the nature of the application, a full search is sometimes not suitable, hence, alternative fast/reduced solutions should be considered. This paper proposes a model and implementation of a flexible motion estimation engine, which can be configured to support any user-defined search strategy. Typically, the computational requirements of the search strategy can be traded with the RD-performance of the obtained video encoder. A CAL dataflow description of the accelerator is proposed so that it can be easily handled in the RVC context. An automatic translation of the proposed CAL module to HDL is performed, and a comparison between the generated HDL with handwritten HDL code of the same model is performed. This helps to evaluate the influences of the CAL model refinements.