Computation error tolerance in motion estimation algorithms

In this paper we study the computation error tolerance properties of motion estimation algorithms. We are motivated by two sce-narios where hardware systems may introduce computation errors. First, we consider hardware faults such as those arising in a typi-cal fabrication process. Second, we consider “soft ” errors due to voltage scaling, which can arise when operating at a lower voltage than specified for the system. Current practice is to discard all faulty systems. However there is an increasing interest in tools that can identify faulty systems which provide acceptable performance. We show that motion estimation (ME) algorithms exhibit significant er-ror tolerance in these two scenarios. We propose simple error models and use these to provide insights into what features in these ME al-gorithms lead to increased error tolerance. Our comparison of the full search ME and a state of the art fast ME approach in the context of H.264/AVC shows that while both techniques are error tolerant, the faster algorithm is in fact more robust to computation errors. Index Terms — Error tolerant compression, Motion estimation, Computational error tolerance, Stuck-at fault, Soft error