Motion estimation for HDTV

Motion vector measurement is a topic of great interest in HDTV signal processing. It has many applications in a number of areas as bandwidth reduction, display rate up-conversion, slow motion smoothing, film motion improvement etc. Careful selection of an HDTV motion estimation algorithm is therefore essential and necessitates a trade off between two conflicting factors-the level of performance and the ease of implementation in hardware. One method which has been widely used is the block matching algorithm (BMA) such as that used in the HD-MAC bandwidth reduction hardware. An alternative to this is the phase correlation method. This has some advantages over the BMA but, historically, has been difficult to realise in real time. Recent progress in integrated circuits has however removed this barrier. Hardware which has been built to perform phase correlation in real time is described