A low power adaptive H.264 video encoder hardware

In this paper, we propose a low power adaptive baseline H.264 video encoder hardware for portable devices. Multiple reference frame motion estimation (MRF ME) used in H.264 standard increases the video coding efficiency at the expense of increased computational complexity and power consumption. In the proposed hardware, the number of reference frames used for MRF ME can be dynamically changed for each macroblock in order to trade-off video coding efficiency and power consumption. The proposed hardware can code 55 CIF (352×288) frames per second with low hardware cost. Its power consumption ranges between 115mW and 235mW depending on the number of reference frames used for MRF ME.