Content-adaptive thresholding early termination scheme on directional gradient descent searches for fast block motion estimation
Hung-Ming Chen, Po-Hung Chen, Cheng-Tso Lin, Ching-Chung Liu · Optical Engineering · 2012
An efficient algorithm named modified directional gradient descent searches to enhance the directional gradient descent search (DGDS) algorithm is presented to reduce computations. A modified search pattern with an adaptive threshold for early termination is applied to DGDS to avoid meaningless calculation after the searching point is good enough. A statistical analysis of best motion vector distribution is analyzed to decide the modified search pattern. Then a statistical model based on the characteristics of the block distortion information of the previous coded frame helps the early termination parameters selection, and a trade-off between the video quality and the computational complexity can be obtained. The simulation results show the proposed algorithm provides significant improvement in reducing the motion estimation (ME) by 17.81% of the average search points and 20% of ME time saving compared to the fast DGDS algorithm implemented in H.264/AVC JM 18.2 reference software according to different types of sequences, while maintaining a similar bit rate without losing picture quality.