4:1 checkerboard algorithm for motion estimation
Nelson Cao, Belle W. Y. Wei · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1996
Motion-compensated prediction is a key technique for achieving high compression performance for a video sequence. Exhaustive search produces the best predictor block but requires intensive computation and expensive hardware. This paper presents a 4:1 checker-board algorithm that reduces the computational complexity of exhaustive search by a factor of 8 while maintaining similar video quality. The algorithm subsamples block pixels by four to one, wand subsamples search locations by two to one. The resulting architecture is simple and scalable, and is suitable for real-time encoding.