Highly parallel HEVC motion estimation based on multiple temporal predictors and nested diamond search

Rate-constrained motion estimation (RCME) is the most computationally intensive task of H.265/HEVC encoding. Massively parallel architectures, such as graphics processing units (GPUs), used in combination with a multi-core central processing unit (CPU), provide a promising computing platform to achieve fast encoding. However, the dependencies in deriving motion vector predictors (MVPs) prevent the parallelization of prediction units (PUs) processing at a frame level. Moreover, the conditional execution structure of typical fast search algorithms is not suitable for GPUs designed for data-intensive parallel problems. In this paper, we propose a novel highly parallel RCME method based on multiple temporal motion vector (MV) predictors and a new fast nested diamond search (NDS) algorithm well-suited for a GPU. The proposed framework provides fine-grained encoding parallelism. Experimental results show that our approach provides reduced GPU load with better BD-Rate compared to prior full search parallel methods based on a single MV predictor.