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

A High permormance hardware architecture for an sad reuse based hierarchical motion estimation algorithm for H.264 video coding

In this paper, we present a high performance and low cost hardware architecture for real-time implementation of an SAD reuse based hierarchical motion estimation algorithm for H.264 / MPEG4 Part 10 video coding. This hardware is designed to be used as part of a complete H.264 video coding system for portable applications. The proposed architecture is implemented in Verilog HDL. The Verilog RTL code is verified to work at 68 MHz in a Xilinx Virtex II FPGA. The FPGA implementation can process 27 VGA frames (640x480) or 82 CIF frames (352x288) per second

A High performance and low cost hardware arcitecture for H.264 transform and quantization algorithms

In this paper, we present a high performance and low cost hardware architecture for real-time implementation of forward transform and quantization and inverse transform and quantization algorithms used in H.264 / MPEG4 Part 10 video coding standard. The hard-ware architecture is based on a reconfigurable datapath with only one multiplier. This hardware is designed to be used as part of a complete low power H.264 video coding system for portable appli-cations. The proposed architecture is implemented in Verilog HDL. The Verilog RTL code is verified to work at 81 MHz in a Xilinx Virtex II FPGA and it is verified to work at 210 MHz in a 0.18´ ASIC implementation. The FPGA and ASIC implementations can code 27 and 70 VGA frames (640x480) per second respectively

High performance hardware architecture for half-pixel accurate H.264 motion estimation

In this paper, we present a high performance and low cost hardware architecture for real-time implementation of half-pel accurate variable block size motion estimation for H.264 / MPEG4 Part 10 video coding. The proposed architecture includes a novel half-pel interpolation hardware that is shared by novel half-pel search hardwares designed for each block size. This half-pel accurate motion estimation hardware is designed to be used as part of a complete H.264 video coding system for portable applications. The proposed architecture is implemented in Verilog HDL. The Verilog RTL code is verified to work at 85 MHz in a Xilinx Virtex II FPGA. The FPGA implementation can process 30 HDTV frames (1280x720) per second

Algorithms & implementation of advanced video coding standards

Advanced video coding standards have become widely deployed coding techniques used in numerous products, such as broadcast, video conference, mobile television and blu-ray disc, etc. New compression techniques are gradually included in video coding standards so that a 50% compression rate reduction is achievable every five years. However, the trend also has brought many problems, such as, dramatically increased computational complexity, co-existing multiple standards and gradually increased development time. To solve the above problems, this thesis intends to investigate efficient algorithms for the latest video coding standard, H.264/AVC. Two aspects of H.264/AVC standard are inspected in this thesis: (1) Speeding up intra4x4 prediction with parallel architecture. (2) Applying an efficient rate control algorithm based on deviation measure to intra frame. Another aim of this thesis is to work on low-complexity algorithms for MPEG-2 to H.264/AVC transcoder. Three main mapping algorithms and a computational complexity reduction algorithm are focused by this thesis: motion vector mapping, block mapping, field-frame mapping and efficient modes ranking algorithms. Finally, a new video coding framework methodology to reduce development time is examined. This thesis explores the implementation of MPEG-4 simple profile with the RVC framework. A key technique of automatically generating variable length decoder table is solved in this thesis. Moreover, another important video coding standard, DV/DVCPRO, is further modeled by RVC framework. Consequently, besides the available MPEG-4 simple profile and China audio/video standard, a new member is therefore added into the RVC framework family. A part of the research work presented in this thesis is targeted algorithms and implementation of video coding standards. In the wide topic, three main problems are investigated. The results show that the methodologies presented in this thesis are efficient and encourage

A flexible heterogeneous hardware/software solution for real-time high-definition H.264 motion estimation

International audienceThe MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 video compression standard introduces a high degree of motion estimation complexity. Quarter-pixel accuracy and variable block-size significantly enhance compression performances over previous standards, but increase computation requirements. Firstly, a DSP-based solution achieves real-time integer motion estimation. Nevertheless, fractional-pixel refinement is too computationally intensive to be efficiently processed on a software-based processor. Secondly, to address this restriction, a flexible and low complexity VLSI sub-pixel refinement coprocessor is designed. Thanks to an improved datapath, a high throughput is achieved with low logic resources. Finally, we propose a heterogeneous (DSP-FPGA) solution to handle real-time motion estimation with variable block-size and fractional-pixel accuracy for high-definition video. It combines efficiency and programmability. The flexibility offers complexity versus performance trade-offs. The system achieves motion estimation of 720p sequences at up to 60 frames per second

High-Efficient Parallel CAVLC Encoders on Heterogeneous Multicore Architectures

This article presents two high-efficient parallel realizations of the context-based adaptive variable length coding (CAVLC) based on heterogeneous multicore processors. By optimizing the architecture of the CAVLC encoder, three kinds of dependences are eliminated or weaken, including the context-based data dependence, the memory accessing dependence and the control dependence. The CAVLC pipeline is divided into three stages: two scans, coding, and lag packing, and be implemented on two typical heterogeneous multicore architectures. One is a block-based SIMD parallel CAVLC encoder on multicore stream processor STORM. The other is a component-oriented SIMT parallel encoder on massively parallel architecture GPU. Both of them exploited rich data-level parallelism. Experiments results show that compared with the CPU version, more than 70 times of speedup can be obtained for STORM and over 50 times for GPU. The implementation of encoder on STORM can make a real-time processing for 1080p @30fps and GPU-based version can satisfy the requirements for 720p real-time encoding. The throughput of the presented CAVLC encoders is more than 10 times higher than that of published software encoders on DSP and multicore platforms

Cost and Coding Efficient Motion Estimation Design Considerations for High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Standard

This paper focuses on motion estimation engine design in future high-efficiency video coding (HEVC) encoders. First, a methodology is explained to analyze hardware implementation cost in terms of hardware area, memory size and memory bandwidth for various possible motion estimation engine designs. For 11 different configurations, hardware cost as well as the coding efficiency are quantified and are compared through a graphical analysis to make design decisions. It has been shown that using smaller block sizes (e.g. 4 × 4) imposes significantly larger hardware requirements at the expense of modest improvements in coding efficiency. Secondly, based on the analysis on various configurations, one configuration is chosen and algorithm improvements are presented to further reduce hardware implementation cost of the selected configuration. Overall, the proposed changes provide 56 × on-chip bandwidth, 151 × off-chip bandwidth, 4.3 × core area and 4.5 × on-chip memory area savings when compared to the hardware implementation of the HM-3.0 design.Texas Instruments Incorporate