Hyo Sun Yoon , Hye Suk Kim , Mi Gyoung Jung , Mi Young Kim , Young Joo Cho , Gi Hong Kim , Guee Sang Lee

The KIPS Transactions:PartB , Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 123-130, Apr. 2009
10.3745/KIPSTB.2009.16.2.123,   PDF Download:

Abstract

Motion estimation (ME) plays an important role in digital video compression. But it limits the performance of image quality and encoding speed and is computational demanding part of the encoder. To reduce computational time and maintain the image quality, integer pel and fractional pel ME methods are proposed in this paper. The proposed method for integer pel ME uses a hierarchical search strategy. This strategy method consists of symmetrical cross-X pattern, multi square grid pattern, diamond patterns. These search patterns places search points symmetrically and evenly that can cover the overall search area not to fall into the local minimum and to reduce the computational time. The proposed method for fractional pel uses full search pattern, center biased fractional pel search pattern and the proposed search pattern. According to block sizes, the proposed method for fractional pel decides the search pattern adaptively. Experiment results show that the speedup improvement of the proposed method over Unsymmetrical cross Multi Hexagon grid Search (UMHexagonS)and Full Search (FS) can be up to around 1.2 ～5.2 times faster. Compared to image quality of FS, the proposed method shows an average PSNR drop of 0.01 dB while showing an average PSNR gain of 0.02 dB in comparison to that of UMHexagonS.

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