An efficient hardware implementation of diamond search motion estimation using CAL dataflow language

Motion estimation represents a key module in video compression. The Reconfigurable Video Coding context (RVC) requires proposing a flexible solution for motion estimation. The motion estimation performance should be modified to fit with the user or the environment's constraints. Depending on the required performances fixed by the application, a full search is sometimes not suitable, hence, alternative fast/reduced solutions should be considered. In this paper, an efficient Diamond Search motion estimation, described in RVC-CAL actor language, is introduced. Starting from a high level description based CAL language, an automatic translation of the proposed CAL module to HDL is performed. This is meant to give designers an edge over its market competitors by substantially reducing the Time to Market (TTM). A comparison between the generated HDL with a previous work supporting user search strategy and handwritten code is also provided. The results show substantial improvement in term of operating frequency and silicon area to previous work based CAL description.