Abstract
The block-matching motion estimation has been aggressively developed for years. Many papers have presented fast block-matching algorithms (FBMAs) for the reduction of computation complexity. Nevertheless, their results, in terms of video quality and bitrate, are rather content-varying. Very few FBMAs can result in stationary or quasistationary video quality for different motion types of video content. Instead of using multiple search algorithms, this paper proposes a quality-stationary motion estimation with a unified search mechanism. This paper presents a content-motion-aware motion estimation for quality-stationary video coding. Under the rate control mechanism, the proposed motion estimation, based on subsample approach, adaptively adjusts the subsample ratio with the motion-level of video sequence to keep the degradation of video quality low. The proposed approach is a companion for all kinds of FBMAs in H.264/AVC. As shown in experimental results, the proposed approach can produce stationary quality. Comparing with the full-search block-matching algorithm, the quality degradation is less than 0.36 dB while the average saving of power consumption is 69.6%. When applying the proposed approach for the fast motion estimation (FME) algorithm in H.264/AVC JM reference software, the proposed approach can save 62.2% of the power consumption while the quality degradation is less than 0.27 dB.
Highlights
Motion Estimation (ME) has been proven to be effective to exploit the temporal redundancy of video sequences and, becomes a key component of multimedia standards, such as MPEG standards and H.26X [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
We present a quality-stationary ME that is aware of content motion
By setting the subsample ratio according to the motion-level, the proposed algorithm can have the quality degradation low all over the video frames and require low computation load
Summary
Motion Estimation (ME) has been proven to be effective to exploit the temporal redundancy of video sequences and, becomes a key component of multimedia standards, such as MPEG standards and H.26X [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. To reduce the computational complexity of the fullsearch block-matching (FSBM) algorithm, researchers have proposed various fast algorithms. They either reduce search steps [12, 15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22] or simplify calculations of error criterion [8, 23,24,25]. By combining stepreduction and criterion-simplifying, some researchers proposed two-phase algorithms to balance the performance between complexity and quality [26,27,28] These fast algorithms have been shown that they can significantly reduce the computational load while the average quality degradation is little.
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