Efficient computation of correlation coefficient using negative reference in template matching applications

Design and implementation of a new early termination algorithm for efficient calculation of correlation coefficient for template matching is presented. The proposed algorithm correlates the candidates against `negative` (bit-inverted) version of reference instead of the original to implement a low cost early termination criterion. Around 10% computational savings have been demonstrated while using the proposed algorithm to compute normalised correlation as error metric for motion estimation in software implementation of H.264 video encoder. The algorithm lends itself to efficient hardware implementation because of its simple cost function. Further hardware savings have been realised by noting that the multiplication products generated by the proposed negative reference correlation algorithm tend to have low magnitudes with significantly less variance than those generated by other schemes. This allows a low-precision summation stage to accumulate majority of the multiplication products without losing the precision of results. Results of the hardware implementation on Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA have been provided. The overall design is shown to consume around 85% less logic resources and operate at 140% higher speed than existing architectures.