A Low-power 4096x2160@30fps H.265/HEVC Video Encoder for Smart Video Surveillance

This paper presents the design and VLSI implementation of a low-power HEVC main profile encoder, which is able to process up to 4096x2160@30fps 4:2:0 encoding in real-time with five-stage pipeline architecture. A pyramid ME (Motion Estimation) engine is employed to reduce search complexity. To compensate for the video sequences with fast moving objects, GME (Global Motion Estimation) are introduced to alleviate the effect of limited search range. We also implement an alternative 5x5 search along with 3x3 to boost video quality. For intra mode decision, original pixels, instead of reconstructed ones are used to reduce pipeline stall. The encoder supports DVFS (Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling) and features three operating modes, which helps to reduce power consumption by 25%. Scalable quality that trades encoding quality for power by reducing size of search range and intra prediction candidates, achieves 11.4% power reduction with 3.5% quality degradation. Furthermore, a lossless frame buffer compression is proposed which reduced DDR bandwidth by 49.1% and power consumption by 13.6%. The entire video surveillance SoC is fabricated with TSMC 28nm technology with 1.96 mm2 area. It consumes 2.88M logic gates and 117KB SRAM. The measured power consumption is 103mW at 350MHz for 4K encoding with high-quality mode. The 0.39nJ/pixel of energy efficiency of this work, which achieves 42% ~ 97% power reduction as compared with reference designs, make it ideal for real-time low-power smart video surveillance applications.