Implementation of a motion estimation hardware accelerator on Zynq SoC

Abstract

The new trends in multimedia and especially in video applications demand the best possible quality, among with low bandwidth and memory usage. While video compression has been used for many decades, now is of even greater significance, particularly in the 4K and 8K UHD standards. In addition, the most time consuming and computationally expensive part of video compression, is the calculation of the objects' movement between successive frames, a procedure known as Motion Estimation. Our purpose in this paper was to create an embedded system which implements a Motion Estimation unit that is being controlled and fed by an ARM CPU. For that reason we used the Xilinx Zynq platform, which provides great flexibility and can be used to effectively evaluate an embedded system prototype. Our experimental results illustrate that it is perfectly feasible to implement fast and reliable accelerators, especially for multimedia applications, in a platform such as Xilinx Zynq.