Self-reconfigurable approach for computation-intensive motion estimation algorithm in H.264/AVC

The authors propose a self-reconfigurable approach to perform H.264/AVC variable block size motion estimation computation on field-programmable gate arrays. We use dynamic partial reconfiguration to change the hardware architecture of motion estimation during run-time. Hardware adaptation to meet the real-time computing requirements for the given video resolutions and frame rates is performed through self-reconfiguration. An embedded processor is used to control the reconfiguration of partial bitstreams of motion estimation adaptively. The partial bitstreams for different motion estimation computation arrays are compressed using LZSS algorithm. On-chip BlockRAM is used as a cache to pre-store the partial bitstreams so that run-time reconfiguration can be fully utilized. We designed a hardware module to fetch the pre-stored partial bitstream from BlockRAM to an internal configuration access port. Comparison results show that our motion estimation architecture improves toward data reuse, and the memory bandwidth overhead is reduced. Using our self-reconfigurable platform, the reconfiguration overhead can be removed and 367 MB/sec reconfiguration rate can be achieved. The experimental results show that the external memory accesses are reduced by 62.4% and it can operate at a frequency of 91.7 MHz.