Fast sub-pixel motion estimation for h.264

Authors:
Hong Yin Lim;Ashraf A. Kassim
Affiliations:
National University of Singapore, Singapore;National University of Singapore, Singapore
Venue:
ACIVS'06 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Advanced Concepts For Intelligent Vision Systems
Year:
2006

Citing 2
Cited 0

Fast motion estimation within the H.264 codec

ICME '03 Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on Multimedia and Expo - Volume 3 (ICME '03) - Volume 03
Overview of the H.264/AVC video coding standard

IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology

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Abstract

Due to the variable block sizes and multi-reference frame used in the H.264/AVC standard; the motion estimation process becomes even more computationally intensive, resulting in a very low encoding speed. To overcome this low encoding speed, fast motion estimation algorithms such as UMHexagonS [1] and EPZS [2] have been proposed. Since the integer-pixel motion estimation speed has significantly decreased, the fractional or sub-pixel motion estimation speed is no longer non-negligible. We propose a fast sub-pixel motion estimation algorithm using an adaptive rood pattern based on the fractional motion vector of adjacent blocks and also a simplified small diamond search. Our algorithm is able to reduce the number of sub-pixel search points by more than 50%, while restricting the PSNR loss to less than 0.1 dB, compared to the hierarchical fractional pixel search.