A 41mW VGA@30fps Quadtree Video Encoder for Video Surveillance Systems

Abstract

Video surveillance systems have a huge market, as indicated by the number of installed cameras, particularly for low-power systems. In this paper, we propose a low-power quadtree video encoder for video surveillance systems. It features a low-complexity motion estimation algorithm, an application-specific ME-MC processor, a dedicated quadtree encoder engine and a processor control-based clock-gating technique. A chip capable of encoding 30fps VGA (640×480) at 80MHz is fabricated using 0.18μm CMOS technology. A total of 153K gates with 558kbits SRAM have been integrated into a 5.0mm×3.5mm die. The power consumption is 40.87mW at 80MHz for VGA at 30fps and 1.97mW at 3.3MHz for QCIF at 15fps.