Shared Block Comparison Engine for Image Registration and Video Coding
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Solution Overview
Problem
Imaging devices face quality degradation due to inadvertent shaking during image capture, leading to blurring or jitter in captured images and videos, which existing image registration techniques struggle to effectively address, especially in cost-sensitive devices like camera phones.
Innovation Solution
An efficient architecture that uses a shared block comparison engine for both image registration and video coding, allowing for block-based comparisons to support image registration and motion estimation, reducing processing and memory overhead while improving image quality.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If separate block comparison engines are used for image registration and video coding, then each function can be optimized independently, but device complexity and cost increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements a shared block comparison engine that serves both image registration and video coding functions. The engine performs block comparisons for image registration to compensate for device shaking and for video coding to enable motion estimation and compensation, thereby eliminating the need for separate dedicated hardware units and reducing overall device complexity while maintaining functional effectiveness
Solution Approach 2:
The patent merges the block comparison functionality into a single shared engine that handles both image registration and video coding tasks. By combining these previously separate functions into one unified hardware unit, the patent reduces the number of components needed in the imaging device, lowering cost and complexity while achieving both image stabilization and video compression objectives
2Speed
If block-based comparison is used for image registration, then processing speed improves, but processing overhead increases
Solution Approach 1:
The shared block comparison engine simultaneously handles both image registration and video coding block comparisons, amortizing the processing overhead across two functional domains. This multi-functionality allows the engine to achieve high processing speeds for both applications while distributing the computational burden, thereby reducing the relative processing overhead for each individual function
Data Source
AI summary
This disclosure describes an efficient architecture for an imaging device that supports image registration for still images and video coding of a video sequence. For image registration, the described architecture uses block-based comparisons of image blocks of a captured image relative to blocks of another reference image to support image registration on a block-by-block basis. For video coding, the described architecture uses block-based comparisons, e.g., to support for motion estimation and motion compensation. According to this disclosure, a common block comparison engine is used on a shared basis for both block-based image registration and block-based video coding. In this way, a hardware unit designed for block-based comparisons may be implemented so as to work in both the image registration process for still images and the video coding process for coding a video sequence.