An efficient versatile video coding motion estimation hardware

Official URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11554-023-01402-8

Versatile Video Coding (VVC) is the latest video coding standard. It provides higher compression efficiency than the previous video coding standards at the cost of significant increase in computational complexity. Motion estimation (ME) is the most time consuming and memory intensive module in VVC encoder. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an efficient VVC ME hardware. It is the first VVC ME hardware in the literature. It has real time performance with small hardware area. This efficiency is achieved by using a 64 × 64 systolic processing element array to support maximum coding tree unit (CTU) size of 128 × 128 and by using a novel memory-based sum of absolute differences (SAD) adder tree to calculate SADs of 128 × 128 CTUs. The proposed VVC ME hardware reduces memory accesses significantly by using an efficient data reuse method. It can process up to 30 4 K (3840 × 2160) video frames per second.