High efficient motion estimation architecture with integrated Motion Compensation and FME support

This paper presents an efficient architecture for Motion Estimation (ME) based on the Diamond Search (DS) Algorithm. This architecture also includes the Motion Compensation (MC) for luminance samples, reusing internal ME results and avoiding the additional external memory accesses for the MC operation. The proposed architecture also generates inputs for a Fractional Motion Estimation (FME) for quarter sample precision, as proposed by the H.264/AVC standard. The main goal of this work is to design a low cost ME architecture for the DS algorithm with reduced number of external memory accesses and ready to be integrated with a fractional interpolator. The designed architecture was synthesized to Altera Stratix 4 family of FPGAs and in the worst case scenario, this architecture is able to process Full HD (1080p) videos in real time.