A Data Reuse Method for Fast Search Motion Estimation

In motion estimation, the search regions of two adjacent current blocks have overlapping data. In view of this, the paper proposes a data reuse method for fast search motion estimation. The method reuses the overlapping data between the search areas of two adjacent blocks. The overlapping data are further divided into two parts, a definite data reuse area and a possible data reuse area. With this method, the memory access time of the algorithm is reduced, and the performance of the algorithm is further improved. And the proposed reuse method can effectively reduce the loading of redundant data. A typical fast search algorithm, diamond search, is used as a case study to verify the effectiveness of the method. The method is implemented on GPU platform. The experimental results show that the data reuse method can reduce the running time by 40%–60% compared with the algorithm of no use data reuse.