A Field and Frame-Based Motion Estimator with a Very Flexible Search Range.
Jin-Suk Kwak, Kim J, Kichul Kim · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1996
In this paper, a low-latency and high throughput semi-systolic array architecture is proposed which can perform both field-based and frame-based motion estimations within single data-flow. Fully pipelined operation for forward and backward motion estimations is provided without any time delay. The proposed architecture has the following properties: 1) the search area data is broadcast to every processing element at the same time, and the reference block data is transferred from one processing element to the next processing element at every clock cycle. This data-flow minimizes the initial delay, and reduces the amount of hardware for storing the search area data. 2) Each processing element computes multiple mean absolute differences(MADs) one by one. Therefore, by using the processing elements repeatedly, motion estimation with a very flexible search range can be performed without any additional hardware. 3) Using the fact that an MAD for one frame reference block can be obtained from the sum of two MADs for top and bottom field blocks, the architecture performs both field-based and frame-based motion estimations within single data-flow.