An efficient area manipulation architecture for frequency domain encoding process

Frequency-Domain Motion Estimation (FD-ME) evolved as a technique that would greatly reduce ME computations and the whole encoding time. In Dynamic Padding FD-ME (DP-FD-ME), a dynamic padding threshold adaptively selects the proper search area size according to a pre-estimated set of motion vectors. The main drawback of DP is the mismatched transformed search area formed from different consecutive transformed blocks which would lead to inaccurate ME. In this paper, efficient area and high speed Manipulation Unit Engine (MUE) is proposed, a main module of DP-FD-ME system, to forge a matched transformed search area from successive transformed blocks. Implementation results nominate the proposed MUE architecture to those multimedia applications that favors reducing both area and power consumption. Simulation results project that MUE, when integrated in a whole FD-ME system, can perform ME for 60 fps of 4CIF video at 172 MHZ. For the best of our knowledge, it is the first attempt to address such architecture.