A novel hybrid motion estimator supporting diamond search and fast full search

We present a novel hardware architecture supporting diamond search and fast full search for block matching motion estimation. It can handle irregular data flow of these fast algorithms without pipeline bubbles, and reduce computation of duplicated search positions. The proposed architecture needs preprocessing with a small amount of computational power while performing fast full search and is suitable for the platform-based video coding system. While the diamond search mode can be applied for real-time requirements, we can choose the fast full search mode, which adapts the processing cycles to picture contents and preserves the same quality of full search block matching (FSBM), for applications of high picture quality or compression ratio. It needs only 9K gates and one additional memory of search range size and is more cost-effective than the conventional systolic array architecture.