TY - JOUR
T1 - Fast variable-size block motion estimation for efficient H.264/AVC encoding
AU - Tu, Yu Kuang
AU - Yang, Jar Ferr
AU - Sun, Ming Ting
AU - Tsai, Yuesheng T.
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was partially supported by National Science Council under Contract #NSC-92-2213- E006-023 and the Opto-Electronics and Systems Laboratories, Industrial Technology Research Institute under Contract # 93S18-S3, Taiwan.
PY - 2005/8
Y1 - 2005/8
N2 - In this paper, an efficient algorithm is proposed to reduce the computational complexity of variable-size block-matching motion estimation. We first investigate features of multiple candidate search centers, adaptive initial-blocksizes, search patterns, and search step-sizes, to match different motion characteristics and block-sizes. To avoid being trapped in local minima, the proposed algorithm uses multiple candidate motion vectors, which are obtained from different block-sizes. To further reduce the computation cost, a threshold-based early stop strategy according to the quantization parameter is suggested. With adaptive initial block-sizes, a merge-or-skip strategy is also proposed to reduce the computation for the final block-size decision. For the H.264/AVC encoder, simulations show that the proposed algorithms can speed up about 2.6-3.9 times of the original JM v6.1d encoder, which uses fast full-search for all block-sizes, and still maintain a comparable rate-distortion performance.
AB - In this paper, an efficient algorithm is proposed to reduce the computational complexity of variable-size block-matching motion estimation. We first investigate features of multiple candidate search centers, adaptive initial-blocksizes, search patterns, and search step-sizes, to match different motion characteristics and block-sizes. To avoid being trapped in local minima, the proposed algorithm uses multiple candidate motion vectors, which are obtained from different block-sizes. To further reduce the computation cost, a threshold-based early stop strategy according to the quantization parameter is suggested. With adaptive initial block-sizes, a merge-or-skip strategy is also proposed to reduce the computation for the final block-size decision. For the H.264/AVC encoder, simulations show that the proposed algorithms can speed up about 2.6-3.9 times of the original JM v6.1d encoder, which uses fast full-search for all block-sizes, and still maintain a comparable rate-distortion performance.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.image.2004.11.003
DO - 10.1016/j.image.2004.11.003
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:22644440783
SN - 0923-5965
VL - 20
SP - 595
EP - 623
JO - Signal Processing: Image Communication
JF - Signal Processing: Image Communication
IS - 7
ER -