3-neighborhood motion estimation in CNN silicon architectures

A 3-neighborhood connection for CNN silicon architectures is presented. The 3-neighborhood connection is ideal for computing the matching criterion, such as MSE or SAD, needed in the motion estimation of current video coding standards such as MPEG-4 or H.264. The 3-neighborhood can achieved eight additional connections. An integrated chip with two 9 × 9 CNN test arrays capable of MSE and SAD calculation was implemented in 0.18 CMOS. Simulations in MPEG-4 show comparable performance to fully digital solutions. In worst case SAD accuracy conditions there is only under a 0.2 dB drop in PSNR and under a 1.3% increase in coded bits. With the MSE the figures are 0.1 dB and 0.71%.