Modified 3-step Search Motion Estimation Algorithm for Effective Early Termination
Hyeon-Cheol Yang, Seongsoo Lee · Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea · 2010
Motion estimation occupies most of the required computation in video compression, and many fast search algorithms were propsoed to reduce huge computation. SAD (sum-of-absolute difference) calculation is the most computation-intensive process in the motion estimation. Early termination is widely used in SAD calculation, where SAD calculation is terminated and it proceeds to next search position if partial SAD during SAD calculation exceeds current minimum SAD. In this paper, we proposed a modified 3-step search algorithm for effective early termination where only search order of search positions are adaptive rearranged. Simulation results show that the proposed motion estimation algorithm reduces computation by 17~30% over conventional 3-step search algorithm without extra computation, while maintaining same performance.