Multi-pass algorithm of motion estimation in video encoding for generic GPU

The importance of video encoding has boomed rapidly since video data communication was widely needed. In this paper, we propose a multi-pass algorithm to accelerate the motion estimation (ME), the dominant part in video encoding, with the graphics processing unit (GPU). By the multi-pass method to unroll and rearrange the multiple nested loops, the complex ME can be implemented on GPU. Besides, ME can be executed efficiently with the built-in parallel processing and texture filter of GPU. Experimental results show that, by utilizing the computing power of GPU, about two times and 14 times speed-up can be achieved for integer-pel ME and MPEG-1/2 half-pel ME, respectively