A versatile and powerful chip for real-time motion estimation

A VLSI architecture that achieves a single-chip real-time implementation of motion estimation is presented. The case of a block matching algorithm that computes a displacement vector for each block of a segmented image is considered. The versatile architecture of the chip allows displacement vectors to be computed for various sizes of template block and matching window, depending on the pixel rate. The chip computes minimum and maximum values of distances, and the distances can be randomly accessed from the outside. Displacements of ±7 at video rate or ±15 for videophone, can be computed for 16×16 blocks