A low energy adaptive motion estimation hardware for H.264 multiview video coding

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11554-013-0383-9

Multiview video coding (MVC) is the process of efficiently compressing stereo (two views) or multiview video signals. The improved compression efficiency achieved by H.264 MVC comes with a significant increase in computational complexity. Temporal prediction and inter-view prediction are the most computationally intensive parts of H.264 MVC. Therefore, in this paper, we propose novel techniques for reducing the amount of computations performed by temporal and inter-view predictions in H.264 MVC. The proposed techniques reduce the amount of computations performed by temporal and inter-view predictions significantly with very small PSNR loss and bit rate increase. We also propose a low energy adaptive H.264 MVC motion estimation hardware for implementing the temporal and inter-view predictions including the proposed computation reduction techniques. The proposed hardware is implemented in Verilog HDL and mapped to a Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGA. The FPGA implementation is capable of processing 30 × 8 = 240 frames per second (fps) of CIF (352 × 288) size eight view video sequence or 30 × 2 = 60 fps of VGA (640 × 480) size stereo (two views) video sequence. The proposed techniques reduce the energy consumption of this hardware significantly.