A modified spiral search algorithm and its embedded hardware implementation

One of the most growing areas in the embedded community is multimedia devices. Multimedia devices incorporate a number of complicated functions for their operation, like motion estimation. A multitude of different implementations have been proposed to reduce motion estimation complexity, such as spiral search. We have studied the implementations of spiral search and identified areas of improvement. We propose a modified spiral search motion estimation algorithm, with lower computational complexity compared to the original spiral search. We have implemented our algorithm on an embedded ARM based architecture, with custom memory hierarchy. The resulting system yields lower energy consumption and higher performance, with some penalty in image quality, compared with the original spiral search algorithm.