Segment-based motion estimation using a block-based engine

Motion estimation is a key function in scan rate conversion, advanced picture quality improvement, 2D-to-3D content conversion, and many other video processing steps. For hardware efficiency reasons, most motion estimation implementations are block-based. As object boundaries commonly do not coincide with block boundaries, artifacts may be visible at object boundaries using the block-based approach. Motion estimation for irregular shapes, such as image segments, can accurately track motion boundaries, but a straightforward translation of block-based motion estimation algorithms to segment-based ones leads to inefficient hardware implementations. Therefore, this paper proposes a modified segment-based motion estimation algorithm utilizing the efficiency of block-based processing. We demonstrates an efficient very large instruction word (VLIW) application-specific instruction-set processor (ASIP) implementation of this algorithm.