An irregular search window reuse scheme for motion estimation in MPEG-2 to H.264 transcoding

Motion estimation (ME) is a computation-intensive operation in video coding system. In MPEG-2 to H.264 transcoding, motion vector (MV) from MPEG-2 reused as search center in H.264 encoder is a simple but effective technique to simplify ME procedure. However directly introducing MPEG-2 MV will bring irregular overlapping between search windows of successive macroblocks (MB) which invalidates the data reuse scheme in hardware design of ME module. In this paper, we propose a search window reuse scheme for transcoding in HDTV application. By utilizing the similarity between neighboring MVs, overlapping of search windows between successive MBs can be regularized. Experiment results show that our method achieve average 93.1% search window reuse rate in HDTV sequence with almost no video quality degradation. And the bandwidth can be reduced to 92.5 Mbytes/s based on theoretical calculation which is only 40.6% of that without this scheme.