Content aware configurable architecture for H.264/AVC integer motion estimation engine

In this paper, we contribute a configurable SAD tree architecture based on adaptive subsampling scheme. Firstly, by further exploiting the spatial feature, the integer motion estimation process is greatly sped up. Secondly, the conventional partial sum of absolute difference (SAD) based pipeline structure is optimized into configurable SAD oriented way, which enhances the performance and solve the data reuse problem caused by adaptive scheme in the architecture level. Moreover, a cross reuse and compressor tree based circuit level optimization is introduced and 6.56% hardware cost is reduced. Experiments show that our design can averagely achieve 42.23% saving in processing cycles compared with previous design. With 323 k gates at about 144.8 MHz, our design can achieve real-time encoding of HDTV 1088 p@30 fps.