Fast motion estimation for H.264

  • Authors:

  • Canhui Cai;Huanqiang Zeng;Sanjit K. Mitra

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Information Science and Technology, Huaqiao University, Quanzhou 362021, China;School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798, Singapore;Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2564, USA

  • Venue:
  • Image Communication
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Several specific features have been incorporated into Motion estimation (ME) in H.264 coding standard to improve its coding efficiency. However, they result in very high computational load. In this paper, a fast ME algorithm is proposed to reduce the computational complexity. First, a mode discriminant method is used to free the encoder from checking the small block size modes in homogeneous regions. Second, a condensed hierarchical block matching method and a spatial neighbor searching scheme are employed to find the best full-pixel motion vector. Finally, direction-based selection rule is utilized to reduce the searching range in sub-pixel ME process. Experimental results on commonly used QCIF and CIF format test sequences have shown that the proposed algorithm achieves a reduction of 88% ME process time on average, while incurring only 0.033dB loss in PSNR and 0.50% increment on the total bit rate compared with that of exhaustive ME process, which is a default approach adopted in the JM reference software.