A 41mW VGA@30fps quadtree video encoder for video surveillance systems

Video surveillance system has a huge market as the number of installed camera shows, especially for the low power ones. This paper proposes a low power quadtree video encoder for video surveillance systems. It features a low complexity motion estimation algorithm, an application specific ME-MC processor, a dedicated qudatree encoder engine and a prediction-based clock gating technique. A chip capable of encoding 30 fps VGA (640times480) at 80 MHz was fabricated using 0.18 mum CMOS technology. A total of 153 K gates with 558 Kbits SRAM have been integrated into a 5.0 mm times 3.5 mm die. The power consumption is 40.87 mW at 80 MHz for VGA 30 fps and 1.97 mW at 3.3 MHz for QCIF 15 fps, respectively.