High speed parallel SAD architecture implementation on FPGA for HEVC encoder

Abstract

Video compression is a very complex and time consuming task which generally pursuit high performance. Motion Estimation (ME) process in any video encoder is responsible to primarily achieve the colossal performance which contributes to significant compression gain. Summation of Absolute Difference (SAD) is widely applied as distortion metric for ME process. With the increase in block size to 64×64 for real time applications along with the introduction of asymmetric mode motion partitioning(AMP) in High Efficiency Video Encoding (HEVC)causes variable block size motion estimation very convoluted. This results in increase in computational time and demands for significant requirement of hardware resources. In this paper parallel SAD hardware circuit for ME process in HEVC is propound where parallelism is used at various levels. The propound circuit has been implemented using Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA for XC5VLX20T family. Synthesis results shows that the propound circuit provides significant reduction in delay and increase in frequency in comparison with results of other parallel architectures.