Fast Sub-pixel Motion Estimation Algorithm Research Articles

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.