Architectures for the sum of absolute differences operation

Efficient architectures for computing the sum of absolute differences (SAD) between two data sets are proposed in application to motion estimation in a mobile video coding system. The proposed architectures combine and further develop advantages of two earlier proposed architectures. As a result, higher performance is achieved despite the lower cost (gate count and power consumption) as compared to a conventional architecture. Proposed architectures are feasible for integrating into mobile video processing systems. They support not only regular, data independent motion estimation strategies but all of those based on the SAD criterion. Early termination mechanisms included into the proposed architecture allow one to avoid unnecessary computations which may often take place in conventional SAD architectures without such mechanisms.