High performance fractional motion estimation and mode decision for H.264/AVC

Abstract

We propose a high performance architecture for fractional motion estimation and Lagrange mode decision in H.264/AVC. Instead of time-consuming fractional-pixel interpolation and secondary search, our fractional motion estimator employees a mathematical model to estimate SADs at quarter-pixel position. Both computation time and memory access requirements are greatly reduced without significant quality degradation. We propose a novel cost function for mode decision that leads to much better performance than traditional low complexity method. Synthesized into a TSMC 0.13 μm CMOS technology, our design takes 56k gates at 100MHz and is sufficient to process QUXGA (3200x2400) video sequences at 30 frames per second (fps). Compared with a state-of-the-art design operating under the same frequency, ours is 30% smaller and has 18 times more throughput at the expense of only 0.05db in PSNR difference. © 2006 IEEE.