Patent ID: 7860166

Claim:
A method for performing motion estimation in video signal processing, the method comprising: allocating a plurality of storage units as a ring buffer to store at least a critical number L of data blocks of a reference frame, wherein the reference frame has a dimension of a width S and a length T, and each of the data block is stored into one of the storage units; establishing a rule relating each of the data blocks to each position of the storage units based on a search window of a size m; initializing the ring buffer by reading in one less the critical number of data blocks from the reference frame; reading in a next data block from the reference frame and storing into a corresponding position of the storage units of the ring buffer in accordance with the rule; generating one or more layers of added border data blocks when the next data block is located next to a border of the reference frame; and performing the motion estimation using a current data block together with the search window constructed from certain ones of the data blocks stored in the ring buffer, wherein the critical number is determined using the size m of the search window, the width S and the length T of the reference frame and a data block accessing sequence of the reference frame.