Architecture of a fast motion estimator for MPEG video coding

This paper describes the design of a high speed motion estimator using the 2-D log search algorithm. The architecture consists of 5 simple processing elements (PE) where each PE is capable of computing the sum-of-absolute-difference (SAD) to exploit the parallelism. For each step in the 2-D log search procedure, the 5 SADs of the 5 search points are computed in parallel. The design is implemented using Verilog and synthesized using Synopsys. Such a chip would be able to generate the motion vector for each 16*16 macroblock in 14.58 μs for 3-step log search, and 24.30 μs for 5-step log search. The architecture is well suited for encoding MPEG2 video up to MP@ML