Adaptive motion estimator for the H264 coder

In this paper we propose an adaptive motion estimation circuit that can be dynamically reconfigured by the best algorithm based on the video nature of the application under running. This configuration is based on a recognition step that collects the motion information´s of each block from its same block in the previous images and their neighbour´s blocs in the current image. The proposed circuit has been designed at Register Transfer Level (RTL) level by using the VHDL language and can be configured by three algorithms (full search, spiral search with threshold and spiral search without threshold). After being integrated into a H264 codec, experimental results show that the adaptive motion estimator allows better results in term of peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and compression ratio relatively to the static based estimators.