Very large scale integration (VLSI) implementation of low-complexity variable block size motion estimation for H.264/AVC coding

This study presents a fast algorithm and its very large scale integration (VLSI) design to implement the variable block size motion estimation. The fast algorithm is proposed with a hardware-oriented concept for regular VLSI design. Simulations show that the proposed algorithm can reduce about 90% motion searching time, whereas PSNR only decreases about 0.02 dB on average. Based on the fast algorithm, VLSI architecture is designed with parallel structure and pipeline timing schedule to achieve high throughput rate for the HDTV system. The chip can compute 41 vectors for various block size during 24-240 cycles as using only 96 processing elements. Comparisons with contemporary VLSI architectures, this chip can offer higher processing speed, wider searching range and lower circuit complexity.