Multiple-Candidate Motion Estimation With Advanced Spatial Filtering of Differential Motion Vectors

A motion estimation system for use in a video encoding pipeline, comprising:

• a first circuit calculating one or more candidate motion vectors for each macroblock of a video image to form a list of candidate motion vectors;
• a second circuit calculating a cost for each candidate motion vector, and sorting the list of candidate motion vectors by cost from lowest cost to highest cost;
• a comparer circuit comparing the calculated candidate motion vectors of a first macroblock with the calculated candidate motion vectors of a plurality of neighbor macroblocks using the lowest cost candidate motion vector as the basis of the cost calculation, wherein the plurality of neighbor macroblocks comprises between two and eight macroblocks;
• and
• a scorer circuit assigning a base score to each candidate motion vector for each macroblock with the lowest cost candidate motion vector for each macroblock receiving an increased base score and increasing the base score or increased base score of a respective candidate motion vector by a point depending on its similarity with a candidate motion vector in a neighbor macroblock.

A method of performing motion estimation in a video encoder within a multi-processor computing system, comprising:

• calculating the cost of a plurality of candidate motion vectors for each macroblock of a video image to form a list of candidate motion vectors in a plurality of processing engines, with each processing engine dedicated to a single respective macroblock;
• comparing the calculated candidate motion vectors of a first macroblock with the calculated candidate motion vectors of up to eight neighboring macroblocks to generate a relative score for each candidate motion vector;
• using the highest scoring candidate motion vector to determine the cost of the candidate motion vectors for each macroblock in one or more subsequent cost calculation steps;
• and
• iteratively comparing and re-scoring the candidate motion vectors until a best candidate motion vector is determined for each macroblock.