A fast motion estimation algorithm for mobile communications
Guobin Chen · Journal of Zhejiang University. Science A · 2006
The limitation of processing power, battery life and memory capacity of portable terminals requires reducing encoding complexity in mobile communications. Motion estimation (ME) is the most computationally intensive module in a typical video codec, which determines not only the encoder’s performance but also the reconstructed video quality. In this paper, a fast ME algorithm for H.264/AVC baseline profile coding is proposed based on the analysis of motion vector field and error surface, and the statistical distributions of different type macroblocks (MBs). Simulation results showed that: in comparison with MVFAST, the proposed algorithm can decrease the computational load over 7.2% with no requirement of expanding memory capacity while maintaining the same video quality as MVFAST. Furthermore, its simplicity makes it easy to be implemented on hardware.