Adaptive search range determination for fast motion estimation

Abstract

The motion estimation (ME) in video codec is extremely important, having acritical effect on encoding time and video quality. Although the full search algorithm is the most fundamental ME method which shows the best video quality, it has high computation complexity. To alleviate this issue, many literatures have been proposed to improve the computational speed and maintain the video quality. In this paper, we propose the new method which determines the search range by using the sum of absolute difference between macroblocks of current frame and reference frame. Experimental results show that proposed method can achieve nearly 209 times computation reduction and can maintain its mean square error performance very close to full search method.