Reduction of checking points using unimodal error surface assumption for fast motion estimation
Jong‐Nam Kim, Tae‐Sun Choi · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1998
The three-step search (TSS) has played a key role in real time video encoding because of its light computational complexity, regularity of search rule, and reasonable performance for reduced computation. Many researches about modified TSS algorithms have been studied for reducing the amount of computation or improving the quality of the image predicted with obtained motion vector. This paper explains a new concept of hierarchical search in motion estimation for more reduction of computational complexity and better error performance compared with conventional modified TSS algorithms. The structure of the proposed algorithm is similar to that of the conventional TSS algorithm. The proposed algorithm, however, has different precision of search for each step. It will be shown that the proposed algorithm is very efficient in terms of speed up for computation and has improved error performance over the conventional modified TSS algorithms. Our proposed algorithm will be useful in software-based real-time video coding and low bit rate video coding.