Adaptive search area for fast motion estimation
This work addresses computational efficiency for video compression applications, but it is incremental as it builds on existing block matching methods with adaptive improvements.
The paper tackles the problem of high computational complexity in motion estimation by proposing an adaptive search area method for block matching, which reduces the search area for most frame blocks while maintaining regularity similar to full search. Simulation results show the proposed algorithm is at least seven times faster than the full search algorithm.
This paper suggests a new method for determining the search area for a motion estimation algorithm based on block matching. The search area is adaptively found in the proposed method for each frame block. This search area is similar to that of the full search (FS) algorithm but smaller for most blocks of a frame. Therefore, the proposed algorithm is analogous to FS in terms of regularity but has much less computational complexity. The temporal and spatial correlations among the motion vectors of blocks are used to find the search area. The matched block is chosen from a rectangular area that the prediction vectors set out. Simulation results indicate that the speed of the proposed algorithm is at least seven times better than the FS algorithm.