An Adaptive Motion Estimation Technique Using Temporal Continuity of Motion

Fast block motion estimation technique is proposed to reduce the computational complexity in video coding. In the conventional methods the size of search region is fixed. For small motion regions like background the small size of sea of search region is enough to find a block motion. But for active motion regions the large size of search region is preferred to figure out the accurate motion vector. Therefore, it is reasonable that a block motion is estimated in the variable search region (both the size and the position of it). That is to say, the search region varies according to the predicted motion characteristics of a block. The block motion in video frames has temporal continuity and then the search region of a current block is predicted using the block motion of previous blocks. The computational complexity of the proposed technique is significantly reduced with a good picture quality compared to the conventional methods.