Multipath Flatted-Hexagon Search for Block Motion Estimation.
Chao-Ho Chen, Tsong-Yi Chen, Da-Jinn Wang, Yifan Li · 2010
Abstract. This paper proposes a novel and simple multipath search with atted-hexagon or diamond pattern for block motion estimation to achieve adjustable speed/accuracy in block-matching algorithm (BMA). To improve the accuracy of the fast BMA near to that of full search (FS), the inherent problem of being trapped at the local minimum block distortion measure (BDM) should be overcome substantially. In the proposed method, a threshold of BDM is introduced to determine the possible-optimal search directions in order to escape from being trapped into a local minimum BDM, followed by a atted-hexagon or diamond search performed in these directions with a BDM below a threshold. Then, the estimated motion vector will be re ned at each search step until the searching process is stopped. The BDM threshold will be adjustable for the purpose of adjusting the search speed and search accuracy speci ed in the certain applications. Experimental results show that the proposed multipath search algorithm can achieve an average match- ing probability up to 98 % near to that of FS and about 10 times of checking points faster than FS in most of real-world sequences.