Hardware efficient early termination mechanism in motion estimation for H.264 AVC

Motion estimation with variable block size is the driver for the high performance of H.264 in video compression. Huge amount of computations and memory access are required to satisfy the needs of motion estimation. Many algorithms proposed to save computations degrade video quality. This work proposes an early termination mechanism at the hardware level that is suitable for variable block size motion estimation without degrading video quality. The simulations show reductions in pixel-lines processed per macro-block of about 38.5% and saving 53.68% of SADs computations. This results to saving in power consumption. The simplicity of the algorithm makes it a hardware friendly mechanism, which could be adopted in any motion estimation hardware design.