High-Performance Motion Estimation for Image Sensors with Video Compression

Sensors

Weizhi Xu¹  Shouyi Yin¹  Leibo Liu¹  Zhiyong Liu²  Shaojun Wei¹ 

[1] Institute of Microelectronics, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China; E-Mails:;State Key Laboratory for Computer Architecture, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China; E-Mail:

关键词: memory bandwidth;    image sensors;    video compression;    motion estimation;    full search;    inter-frame;    data reuse;   

DOI  :  10.3390/s150820752

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

It is important to reduce the time cost of video compression for image sensors in video sensor network. Motion estimation (ME) is the most time-consuming part in video compression. Previous work on ME exploited intra-frame data reuse in a reference frame to improve the time efficiency but neglected inter-frame data reuse. We propose a novel inter-frame data reuse scheme which can exploit both intra-frame and inter-frame data reuse for ME in video compression (VC-ME). Pixels of reconstructed frames are kept on-chip until they are used by the next current frame to avoid off-chip memory access. On-chip buffers with smart schedules of data access are designed to perform the new data reuse scheme. Three levels of the proposed inter-frame data reuse scheme are presented and analyzed. They give different choices with tradeoff between off-chip bandwidth requirement and on-chip memory size. All three levels have better data reuse efficiency than their intra-frame counterparts, so off-chip memory traffic is reduced effectively. Comparing the new inter-frame data reuse scheme with the traditional intra-frame data reuse scheme, the memory traffic can be reduced by 50% for VC-ME.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.