A HW/SW Co-design Methodology for Video Compression Algorithms

Abstract- Many hardware and software co-design methodologies have been proposed to improve overall system performance, reliability and cost-effectiveness of digital systems for decades. This paper presented an efficient co-design methodology using primitive instruction sets and a dynamic out-of-order execution scheduler for a variety of video compression algorithms. As a case study, this paper applies the proposed co-design method to the motion estimation of H.264 video coding standard, which is one of the most time-consuming parts in H.264. This case study shows that the proposed methodology improves motion estimation speed by 13 times compared to naïve motion estimation with a minimal design and coding effort. I