Fast Sub-pixel Motion Estimation Algorithm Research Articles

Fast Subpixel Motion Estimation Based on Human Visual System

More than 80% of video coding times are consumed by motion estimation calculations, which are the most complex aspect of the process. This method eliminates temporal redundancies in a video sequence to achieve maximum compression. Numerous efforts have been made to bring calculations closer to real time, yielding fruitful results. This study proposes a fast subpixel motion estimation algorithm for video encoding with fewer search points. This method employs the capabilities of human visual systems (HVSs), physical motion characteristics of real‐world objects, and special image information from successive frames. The number of search points (NSP) using the statistical data of the movement of the blocks in the frames of video sequences is reduced to apply fewer calculations to the system while maintaining the quality of images. Therefore, it is possible to approach fast and real‐time calculations instead of time‐consuming algorithms by accurately modeling this algorithm.

A Fast Sub-Pixel Motion Estimation Algorithm for H.264/AVC Video Coding

Motion estimation (ME) is one of the most time-consuming parts in video coding. The use of multiple partition sizes in H.264/AVC makes it even more complicated when compared to ME in conventional video coding standards. It is important to develop fast and effective sub-pixel ME algorithms since: 1) the computation overhead by sub-pixel ME has become relatively significant while the complexity of integer-pixel search has been greatly reduced by fast algorithms, and 2) reducing sub-pixel search points can greatly save the computation for sub-pixel interpolation. In this letter, a novel fast sub-pixel ME algorithm is proposed which performs a “rough” sub-pixel search before the partition selection, and performs a “precise” sub-pixel search for the best partition. By reducing the searching load for the large number of non-best partitions, the computation complexity for sub-pixel search can be greatly decreased. Experimental results show that our method can reduce the sub-pixel search points by more than 50% compared to existing fast sub-pixel ME methods with negligible quality degradation.

Fast subpixel motion estimation based on the interpolation effect on different block sizes for H264/AVC

We propose a fast subpixel motion estimation algorithm for the H.264 advanced video coding (AVC) standard. The algorithm utilizes the correlation of the spatial interpolation effect on the full-pixel motion estimation best matches between different block sizes in order to reduce the computational cost of the overall motion-estimation process. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm significantly reduces the CPU cycles in the various motion estimation schemes by up to 16% with similar rate-distortion performance when weighed up against the H.264/AVC standard.