Data reuse in two-level hierarchical motion estimation for high resolution video coding

In hardware implementation of a video coding system memory access becomes a critical issue and the motion estimation (ME) module is the one which consumes most of the data access. To meet the requirements of HD specification, conventional data reuse schemes are not sufficient. In this paper, the hierarchical approach to ME is combined with the Level C and D data reuse schemes. Proposed two-level hierarchical ME algorithm reduces the external memory bandwidth by 77% and the on-chip memory size by 93% with reference to the Level C scheme, and computational complexity by over 99% with reference to the one-level full search (OLFS), achieving the results close to OLFS.