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SIMD-based low bit-depth motion estimation with application to HEVC

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Abstract

Motion estimation (ME) is a crucial stage in video encoding process since it is the main contributor to high compression ratios. However, it is a very time-consuming operation when a full-search-based block-motion estimation approach is adopted in the encoding process. There are many low bit-depth representation ME approaches in the literature which aim to speed-up this processing without scarifying encoding quality because of their possible efficient hardware implementations. In this paper, we present a single instruction multiple data (SIMD)-based methodology specifically designed for low bit-depth ME approaches and show that this approach can be efficiently implemented in software. The proposed method provides encoding time-savings, up to 68%, according to the full search-based motion estimation approach and has less encoding time, up to 15%, with respect to the fast sparse search-based motion estimation approach. Our experiments on state-of-the-art video encoding standard HEVC clearly show that low bit-depth approaches can have potential in software implementations as well.

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Correspondence to Ramazan Duvar.

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Duvar, R., Küçükmanisa, A., Akbulut, O. et al. SIMD-based low bit-depth motion estimation with application to HEVC. SIViP 17, 1449–1456 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-022-02353-6

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