Parallel spiral search algorithm applied to integer motion estimation

Abstract

Thanks to its flexible coding structure, high-efficiency video coding (HEVC) can save more coding bit rates than the previous standard, H.264. However, it also increases the complexity of integer-pixel motion estimation (IME). To speed up the encoding process, we propose a parallel spiral search (PSS) algorithm, which features the following characteristics and advantages. First, the proposed algorithm is hardware-friendly. PSS has both a fix search order that cuts the correlation between search points and a high data reuse level that facilitates the pipeline application in hardware implementation. Second, the PSS algorithm processes all prediction units (PU) blocks in parallel, which speeds up the RD calculation. Finally, the early termination strategy is proposed to end the search for unnecessary search points and further reduce search time. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms other popular hardware-oriented IME algorithms in terms of coding speed, with the same loss of RD performance. Compared with the default full search algorithm (FSA) in the HEVC test model HM-16.7, the proposed algorithm achieves average time saving ratio of up to 92.55%, with BD-PSNR loss of 0.056 dB and an increase by 1.38% in terms of BD-BR.