Combined frame memory motion compensation for video coding

The frame memory has long been the dominant component in a video decoder in terms of energy, area, and latency. We proposed a non-combined frame memory motion compensation (CFMMC) for video decoding which facilitates the characteristic of the perfect-matched macroblock (MB) to avoid unnecessary memory access and to save energy. The statistic result confirms that some sequences have more than 70% of MBs being perfect-matched MB. The CFMMC hardware architecture is further evaluated for latency, area, and energy. The hardware architecture shows that with SRAM-base frame memory, the equivalent gate count can be reduced by 37.7%, and the energy consumption and the latency may also be improved for sequences with enough percentage of perfect-matched MBs. Since the benefit of the CFMMC is highly dependent on the percentage of perfect-matched MBs, it is best suited for applications with large portion of static background, such as video surveillance, video telephony, and video conferencing.