Motion estimation and CABAC VLSI co-processors for real-time high-quality H.264/AVC video coding

Real-time and high-quality video coding is gaining a wide interest in the research and industrial community for different applications. H.264/AVC, a recent standard for high performance video coding, can be successfully exploited in several scenarios including digital video broadcasting, high-definition TV and DVD-based systems, which require to sustain up to tens of Mbits/s. To that purpose this paper proposes optimized architectures for H.264/AVC most critical tasks, Motion estimation and context adaptive binary arithmetic coding. Post synthesis results on sub-micron CMOS standard-cells technologies show that the proposed architectures can actually process in real-time 720 × 480 video sequences at 30 frames/s and grant more than 50 Mbits/s. The achieved circuit complexity and power consumption budgets are suitable for their integration in complex VLSI multimedia systems based either on AHB bus centric on-chip communication system or on novel Network-on-Chip (NoC) infrastructures for MPSoC (Multi-Processor System on Chip

Optimization of the motion estimation for parallel embedded systems in the context of new video standards

15 pagesInternational audienceThe effciency of video compression methods mainly depends on the motion compensation stage, and the design of effcient motion estimation techniques is still an important issue. An highly accurate motion estimation can significantly reduce the bit-rate, but involves a high computational complexity. This is particularly true for new generations of video compression standards, MPEG AVC and HEVC, which involves techniques such as different reference frames, sub-pixel estimation, variable block sizes. In this context, the design of fast motion estimation solutions is necessary, and can concerned two linked aspects: a high quality algorithm and its effcient implementation. This paper summarizes our main contributions in this domain. In particular, we first present the HME (Hierarchical Motion Estimation) technique. It is based on a multi-level refinement process where the motion estimation vectors are first estimated on a sub-sampled image. The multi-levels decomposition provides robust predictions and is particularly suited for variable block sizes motion estimations. The HME method has been integrated in a AVC encoder, and we propose a parallel implementation of this technique, with the motion estimation at pixel level performed by a DSP processor, and the sub-pixel refinement realized in an FPGA. The second technique that we present is called HDS for Hierarchical Diamond Search. It combines the multi-level refinement of HME, with a fast search at pixel-accuracy inspired by the EPZS method. This paper also presents its parallel implementation onto a multi-DSP platform and the its use in the HEVC context

Algoritmo de estimação de movimento e sua arquitetura de hardware para HEVC

Doutoramento em Engenharia EletrotécnicaVideo coding has been used in applications like video surveillance, video conferencing, video streaming, video broadcasting and video storage. In a typical video coding standard, many algorithms are combined to compress a video. However, one of those algorithms, the motion estimation is the most complex task. Hence, it is necessary to implement this task in real time by using appropriate VLSI architectures. This thesis proposes a new fast motion estimation algorithm and its implementation in real time. The results show that the proposed algorithm and its motion estimation hardware architecture out performs the state of the art. The proposed architecture operates at a maximum operating frequency of 241.6 MHz and is able to process 1080p@60Hz with all possible variables block sizes specified in HEVC standard as well as with motion vector search range of up to ±64 pixels.A codificação de vídeo tem sido usada em aplicações tais como, vídeovigilância, vídeo-conferência, video streaming e armazenamento de vídeo. Numa norma de codificação de vídeo, diversos algoritmos são combinados para comprimir o vídeo. Contudo, um desses algoritmos, a estimação de movimento é a tarefa mais complexa. Por isso, é necessário implementar esta tarefa em tempo real usando arquiteturas de hardware apropriadas. Esta tese propõe um algoritmo de estimação de movimento rápido bem como a sua implementação em tempo real. Os resultados mostram que o algoritmo e a arquitetura de hardware propostos têm melhor desempenho que os existentes. A arquitetura proposta opera a uma frequência máxima de 241.6 MHz e é capaz de processar imagens de resolução 1080p@60Hz, com todos os tamanhos de blocos especificados na norma HEVC, bem como um domínio de pesquisa de vetores de movimento até ±64 pixels

Autonomous Recovery Of Reconfigurable Logic Devices Using Priority Escalation Of Slack

Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices offer a suitable platform for survivable hardware architectures in mission-critical systems. In this dissertation, active dynamic redundancy-based fault-handling techniques are proposed which exploit the dynamic partial reconfiguration capability of SRAM-based FPGAs. Self-adaptation is realized by employing reconfiguration in detection, diagnosis, and recovery phases. To extend these concepts to semiconductor aging and process variation in the deep submicron era, resilient adaptable processing systems are sought to maintain quality and throughput requirements despite the vulnerabilities of the underlying computational devices. A new approach to autonomous fault-handling which addresses these goals is developed using only a uniplex hardware arrangement. It operates by observing a health metric to achieve Fault Demotion using Recon- figurable Slack (FaDReS). Here an autonomous fault isolation scheme is employed which neither requires test vectors nor suspends the computational throughput, but instead observes the value of a health metric based on runtime input. The deterministic flow of the fault isolation scheme guarantees success in a bounded number of reconfigurations of the FPGA fabric. FaDReS is then extended to the Priority Using Resource Escalation (PURE) online redundancy scheme which considers fault-isolation latency and throughput trade-offs under a dynamic spare arrangement. While deep-submicron designs introduce new challenges, use of adaptive techniques are seen to provide several promising avenues for improving resilience. The scheme developed is demonstrated by hardware design of various signal processing circuits and their implementation on a Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGA device. These include a Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) core, Motion Estimation (ME) engine, Finite Impulse Response (FIR) Filter, Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) blocks in addition to MCNC benchmark circuits. A iii significant reduction in power consumption is achieved ranging from 83% for low motion-activity scenes to 12.5% for high motion activity video scenes in a novel ME engine configuration. For a typical benchmark video sequence, PURE is shown to maintain a PSNR baseline near 32dB. The diagnosability, reconfiguration latency, and resource overhead of each approach is analyzed. Compared to previous alternatives, PURE maintains a PSNR within a difference of 4.02dB to 6.67dB from the fault-free baseline by escalating healthy resources to higher-priority signal processing functions. The results indicate the benefits of priority-aware resiliency over conventional redundancy approaches in terms of fault-recovery, power consumption, and resource-area requirements. Together, these provide a broad range of strategies to achieve autonomous recovery of reconfigurable logic devices under a variety of constraints, operating conditions, and optimization criteria

Energy efficient enabling technologies for semantic video processing on mobile devices

Semantic object-based processing will play an increasingly important role in future multimedia systems due to the ubiquity of digital multimedia capture/playback technologies and increasing storage capacity. Although the object based paradigm has many undeniable benefits, numerous technical challenges remain before the applications becomes pervasive, particularly on computational constrained mobile devices. A fundamental issue is the ill-posed problem of semantic object segmentation. Furthermore, on battery powered mobile computing devices, the additional algorithmic complexity of semantic object based processing compared to conventional video processing is highly undesirable both from a real-time operation and battery life perspective. This thesis attempts to tackle these issues by firstly constraining the solution space and focusing on the human face as a primary semantic concept of use to users of mobile devices. A novel face detection algorithm is proposed, which from the outset was designed to be amenable to be offloaded from the host microprocessor to dedicated hardware, thereby providing real-time performance and reducing power consumption. The algorithm uses an Artificial Neural Network (ANN), whose topology and weights are evolved via a genetic algorithm (GA). The computational burden of the ANN evaluation is offloaded to a dedicated hardware accelerator, which is capable of processing any evolved network topology. Efficient arithmetic circuitry, which leverages modified Booth recoding, column compressors and carry save adders, is adopted throughout the design. To tackle the increased computational costs associated with object tracking or object based shape encoding, a novel energy efficient binary motion estimation architecture is proposed. Energy is reduced in the proposed motion estimation architecture by minimising the redundant operations inherent in the binary data. Both architectures are shown to compare favourable with the relevant prior art

Reconfigurable Architecture For H.264/avc Variable Block Size Motion Estimation Based On Motion Activity And Adaptive Search Range

Motion Estimation (ME) technique plays a key role in the video coding systems to achieve high compression ratios by removing temporal redundancies among video frames. Especially in the newest H.264/AVC video coding standard, ME engine demands large amount of computational capabilities due to its support for wide range of different block sizes for a given macroblock in order to increase accuracy in finding best matching block in the previous frames. We propose scalable architecture for H.264/AVC Variable Block Size (VBS) Motion Estimation with adaptive computing capability to support various search ranges, input video resolutions, and frame rates. Hardware architecture of the proposed ME consists of scalable Sum of Absolute Difference (SAD) arrays which can perform Full Search Block Matching Algorithm (FSBMA) for smaller 4x4 blocks. It is also shown that by predicting motion activity and adaptively adjusting the Search Range (SR) on the reconfigurable hardware platform, the computational cost of ME required for inter-frame encoding in H.264/AVC video coding standard can be reduced significantly. Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration is a unique feature of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) that makes best use of hardware resources and power by allowing adaptive algorithm to be implemented during run-time. We exploit this feature of FPGA to implement the proposed reconfigurable architecture of ME and maximize the architectural benefits through prediction of motion activities in the video sequences ,adaptation of SR during run-time, and fractional ME refinement. The implemented ME architecture can support real time applications at a maximum frequency of 90MHz with multiple reconfigurable regions. iv When compared to reconfiguration of complete design, partial reconfiguration process results in smaller bitstream size which allows FPGA to implement different configurations at higher speed. The proposed architecture has modular structure, regular data flow, and efficient memory organization with lower memory accesses. By increasing the number of active partial reconfigurable modules from one to four, there is a 4 fold increase in data re-use. Also, by introducing adaptive SR reduction algorithm at frame level, the computational load of ME is reduced significantly with only small degradation in PSNR (≤0.1dB)