Hardware co-processors for Real-Time and High-Quality H.264/AVC video coding

Real-Time and High-Quality video coding is gaining a wide interest in the research community, mainly for entertainment and leisure applications. Furthemore H.264/AVC, the most recent standard for high performance video coding, can be successfully exploited in such a critical scenario. The need for high-quality imposes to sustain up to tens of Mbits/s. To that purpose in this paper optimized architectures for H.264/AVC most critical tasks, Motion Estimation (ME) and Context Aware Binary Arithmetic Coding (CABAC) are proposed. Post synthesis results on a 0.18 μ m standard cells technology show that the proposed architectures can actually process in real time 720×480 video sequences at 30 Hz and grant more than 20Mbits/s in the simplest configuration.