An efficient adaptive manipulation architecture for real time video coding in Frequency Domain

Motion estimation (ME) consumes approximately up to 70% of the entire video encoder´s computations and is it´s main exhaustive time consuming process. Frequency-Domain Motion Estimation (FDME) evolved as a technique that would greatly reduce ME computations and the whole encoding time. In Dynamic Padding FDME (DP-FDME), a dynamic padding threshold adaptively selects the proper search area size according to a pre-estimated set of motion vectors. The main drawback of DP is the mismatched transformed search area formed from different consecutive transformed blocks which would lead to inaccurate ME. In this paper, efficient high speed architecture is proposed to implement an adaptive Manipulation Unit Engine (MUE), a main module of DP-FDME system, to forge a matched transformed search area from successive transformed blocks. Implementation results nominate the proposed MUE architecture to those multimedia applications that favors high speed processing as a trade-off to an acceptable increase in area and power. Simulation results project that MUE, when integrated in a whole FDME system, can perform ME for 60 fps of 4CIF video at 172 MHZ.