Fast motion estimation using feature extraction and XOR operations

Motion estimation is a temporal image compression technique where an n × n block of pixels in the current frame of a video sequence is represented by a motion vector with respect to the best matched block in a search area of the previous frame, and the DCT coefficients of the estimated error terms. In this paper, a fast technique for motion estimation is proposed and later mapped onto the SIMD structure of the Computational*RAM (C*RAM). C*RAM is a conventional computer DRAM (or SRAM) with built-in logic circuitry at the sense-amplifier to take advantage of the high on-chip memory bandwidth and massively parallel SIMD (Single-Instruction stream, Multiple-Data stream) operations. The proposed technique, first, attempts to reduce the n-bit grayscale frames into 1-bit binary frames using morphological filters, and to search for motions of the extracted features on the binary frames. While the reduction procedure requires a small percentage of computation using the full grayscale, the search procedure is performed by simple XOR logic operations and 1-b distortion accumulations on the entire search area. The second part of the paper presents the mapping of the proposed technique onto the C*RAM architecture.