A Hardware-friendly CTU-level IME Algorithm for VVC

The new coding tools improved the performance for H.266/VVC but also brought challenges for hardware integer motion estimation (IME). First, the data dependency in deriving a predicted motion vector (PMV) is more severe. Second, the overhead of IME is increased by the complex partition mechanism. The challenges are tougher for IME in coding tree unit (CTU) level pipelined encoder. In this paper, we propose a hardware-friendly CTU-level IME algorithm with three innovative designs. First, a PMV prediction is proposed to derive PMVs in advance. Second, all divided blocks are categorized into either binary/quadra tree (BTQT) or ternary tree (TT) blocks. The motion vectors (MVs) of BTQT blocks are estimated with a multi-resolution search. The MVs of TT blocks are inferred from the estimated MVs with an inference algorithm. The proposed algorithm suffers 1.20% degradation but reduced the complexity by 80% compared to the reference software.