Low-energy motion estimation memory system with dynamic management

Abstract

The digital video coding process imposes severe pressure on memory traffic, leading to considerable power consumption related to frequent DRAM accesses. External off-chip memory demand needs to be minimized by clever architecture/ algorithm co-design, thus saving energy and extending battery lifetime during video encoding. To exploit temporal redundancies among neighboring frames, the motion estimation (ME) algorithm searches for good matching between the current block and blocks within reference frames stored in external memory. To save energy during ME, this work performs memory accesses distribution analysis of the test zone search (TZS) ME algorithm and, based on this analysis, proposes both a multi-sector scratchpad memory design and dynamic management for the TZS memory access. Our dynamic memory management, called neighbor management, reduces both static consumption-by employing sectorlevel power gating-and dynamic consumption-by reducing the number of accesses for ME execution. Additionally, our dynamic management was integrated with two previously proposed solutions: a hardware reference frame compressor and the Level C data reuse scheme (using a scratchpad memory). This system achieves a memory energy consumption savings of 99.8% and, when compared to the baseline solution composed of a reference frame compressor and data reuse scheme, the memory energy consumption was reduced by 44.1% at a cost of just 0.35% loss in coding efficiency, on average. When compared with related works, our system presents better memory bandwidth/energy savings and coding efficiency results.

An efficient VLSI architecture for fast motion estimation by hybridizing parallel spiral and adaptive threshold star diamond search algorithm‐based search algorithm in HEVC

“…Over the past 20 years, digital media becomes growth and prosperity of the global industry. 2 Very large-scale integrated circuit (VLSI) generates the fast development, also diversity of inspiring applications for digital media. 3 Advance method of video coding is critically versatile video applications along data-intensive users helps overcome the profit of industries as digital media.…”

“…It is broadly utilized certain standard video coding, like MPEG‐1, ‐2, ‐4, H.264/AVC. Over the past 20 years, digital media becomes growth and prosperity of the global industry 2 . Very large‐scale integrated circuit (VLSI) generates the fast development, also diversity of inspiring applications for digital media 3 .…”