High-Efficient Video Transmission for HDTV Broadcasting

Abstract

Before broadcasting a video signal, redundant data should be removed from the transmitted video signal. This redundancy operation can be performed using many video coding standards such as H.264/Advanced Video Coding (AVC) and H.265/High-Efficient Video Coding (HEVC) standards. Although both standards produce a great video resolution, too much data are considered to be still redundant. The most exhaustive process in video encoding process is the Motion Estimation (ME) process. The more the resolution of the transmitted video signal, the more the video data to be fetched from the main memory. This will increase the required memory access time for performing the Motion Estimation process. In This chapter, a smart ME coprocessor architecture, which greatly reduces the memory access time, is presented. Data reuse algorithm is used to minimize the memory access time. The discussed coprocessor effectively reuses the data of the search area to minimize the overall memory access time (I/O memory bandwidth) while fully using all resources and hardware. This would speed up the video broadcasting process. For a search range of 32 × 32 and block size of 16 × 16, the architecture can perform Motion Estimation for 30 fps of HDTV video and easily outperforms many fast full-search architectures.