A quarter pel full search block motion estimation architecture for H.264/AVC

This paper presents a novel quarter pel full search block motion estimation architecture for H.264/AVC encoder. The proposed architecture is capable of calculating all 41 motion vectors required by the various size blocks, supported by H.264/AVC, in parallel. The architecture has been prototyped in Verilog HDL, simulated and synthesized for Xilinx Virtex2 FPGA. The experimental result shows that the architecture is capable of processing CIF frame sequences in real time considering 5 reference frames within the search range of -3.75 to +4.00 at a clock speed of 120 MHz. The maximum speed of the architecture is around 150 MHz.