A Hardware-Friendly and Configurable Heuristic Targeting VVC Inter-Frame Prediction.

VVC is the state-of-the-art video coding standard and provides very high coding efficiency at a cost of an impressively high computational cost. Then, the development of hardware-friendly speed-up solutions is important for the broad adoption of this standard, mainly if battery-powered devices are considered. This paper presents a configurable heuristic targeting the Unidirectional, Bidirectional, and Affine Versatile Video Coding (VVC) motion estimation (ME) steps. The heuristic is easy to be implemented in hardware and is based on an adaptive reduction of evaluated coding unit (CU) sizes to reduce energy consumption. Three operation points are supported, reaching from 7.7% to 30% of energy consumption savings at a coding efficiency cost from 0.04% to 1%. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first work in the literature presenting a configurable hardware-friendly solution targeting the VVC motion estimation steps.