A hardware-oriented IME algorithm and its implementation for HEVC

The flexible coding structure in High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) introduces many challenges to real-time implementation of the integer-pel motion estimation (IME). In this paper, a hardware-oriented IME algorithm naming parallel clustering tree search (PCTS) is proposed, where various prediction units (PU) are processed simultaneously with a parallel scheme. The PCTS consists of four hierarchical search steps. After each search step, PUs with the same MV candidate are clustered to one group. And the next search step is shared by PUs in the same group. Owing to the top-down tree-structure search strategy of the PCTS, search processes are highly shared among different PUs and system throughput is thus significantly increased. As a result, the hardware implementation based on the proposed algorithm can support real-time video applications of QFHD (3840×2160) at 30fps.