An efficient architecture of binary motion estimation for MPEG-4 shape coding

This paper presents an efficient architecture of binary motion estimation (BME) for MPEG-4 shape coding. This architecture, called DDBME, mainly consists of a data dispatch based 1-D systolic array and a 16x32 bit search range buffer. In DDBME, bit parallelism technique is applied on the SAD calculation of block matching algorithm. In order to support efficiently bit-data parallel processing, bit addressing should be taken into consideration. The data dispatch technique is applied on 1-D array by the hardwired data flow routing such that the bit addressing operations can be efficiently reduced. The DDBME operating at 7.29 MHz can handle the real-time requirement for encoding MPEG-4 shape sequence at core profile level 2, i.e. 2 VOs with CIF format, 30 fps and assuming each frame contains 30% boundary macroblocks in average. For the same real-time specification, the optimized software running on RISC (Ultra Spare, 300MHz) can only achieve 1/20 performance.