Analysis and hardware architecture for global motion estimation in MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile

Global motion estimation (GME) and compensation is one of the key modules in MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile (ASP). However, there are no hardware architectures for GME since existing algorithms are not suitable for hardware implementation. In this paper, GME in MPEG-4 ASP is analyzed, and a hardware-oriented GME algorithm is proposed according to the analysis results, which is a combination of a feature points based algorithm and a novel iterative sprite point matching algorithm. The associated hardware architecture is also proposed. Simulation results show that the performance of the proposed algorithm is the same as that of MPEG-4 Verification Model. The implementation results show the proposed hardware architecture can achieve the requirements of MPEG-4 ASP@L3 with 66K gates and 31Kb internal memory at 100 MHz working frequency.