Abstract: The present invention discloses a novel combination for low cost, stand alone video cameras with surveillance features. In the embodiments, the camera body can be manufactured utilizing inexpensive materials such as press molded plastic, the view finder can be a simple through-hole without a lens, simple indicator lights and buttons can be utilized for programming and status functions, and a removable memory card can be used as primary storage. The video camera can operate on one or more batteries or external power. The video camera can be embedded with surveillance functions offering a variety of programming modes for operating as a security camera. By providing only essential features and features that can be manufactured at low cost, the overall cost of the resulting camera can be kept very low.

Abstract: The present invention provides a framework for the processing of blocks between two data frames and in particular application to motion estimation calculations in which a balance among the performance of a motion search algorithm, the size of on-chip memory to store the reference data, and the required data transfer bandwidth between on-chip and external memory can be optimized in a scalable manner, such that the total system cost with hierarchical embedded memory structure can be optimized in a flexible manner. The scope of the present invention is not limited to digital video encoding in which motion vector is part of information to be encoded, but is applicable to any other implementation in which difference between any two data frames are to be computed.