A cost-effective implementation of object-based motion estimation

Emerging applications in the mobile and automotive industries can benefit from a solution which can segment an image into objects. Although originally not developed for these applications, object-based motion estimation (OME) is an algorithm which provides such a segmentation. We map this algorithm on an application specific instruction processor (ASIP) based on a very long instruction word (VLIW) template. An analysis of the computational requirements is made, using video format conversion as an application, since emerging applications are not available yet. We also propose a multi-level caching architecture to keep bandwidth and power requirements low and discuss algorithmic changes to OME, which are necessary for OME to be mapped on an ASIP VLIW. A quality comparison of the resulting vector fields is made as well.