Bandwidth and local memory reduction of video encoders using Bit Plane Partitioning Memory Management

This paper presents a new memory management scheme for the reference frame buffer in a video encoder. The proposed BPPMM (bit plane partitioning memory management) scheme changes the format of data, and hence we can access different number of the bit-planes of the pixel data on-demand. This BPPMM technique is especially suitable for motion estimation with bit-truncation. Experiments show that when BPPMM scheme is integrated in an H.264 hardware encoder, more than 46% of local SRAM size and 31% of the external memory bandwidth could be reduced with only a little quality degradation.