• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.47 no.1
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• pp.79-85
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• 2010

In video standards such as H.264/AVC, motion estimation (ME) / compensation (MC) is regarded as a vital component in a video coder as it consumes a large amount of computation resources. The full search technique, which is used in general video codecs, gives the highest visual quality but also has the problem of significant computational load. To solve this problem, many fast algorithm has benn proposed. Among them, NPDS show that can maintain its video quality very close to the full search technique while achieving computation reduction by using a halfway-stop technique in the calculation of block distortion measure. In this paper, we proposed algorithm by determining minimum distortion measure with predictive motion vector and using the new search order. As the result, we can check that the proposed algorithm reduces the computational load 95% in average compared to the full search, respectively with the PSNR lost about 0.04dB.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.401-406
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• 2011

This paper presents a fast block-matching algorithm based on the normalized cross-correlation, where the elimination order is determined based on the gradient magnitudes of subblocks in the current macroblock. Multilevel Cauchy-Schwartz inequality is derived to skip unnecessary block-matching calculations in the proposed algorithm. Also, additional complexity reduction is achieved re-using the normalized cross correlation values for the spatially neighboring macroblock because the search areas of adjacent macroblocks are overlapped. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can improve the speed-up ratio up to about 3 times in comparison with the existing algorithm.

• Journal of information and communication convergence engineering
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.53-59
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• 2014

Motion estimation is a core part of most video compression systems since it directly affects the output video quality and the encoding time. The full search (FS) technique gives the highest visual quality but has the problem of a significant computational load. To solve this problem, we present in this paper a modified median (MMED) operation and advanced search strategies for fast motion estimation. The proposed MMED operation includes a temporally co-located motion vector (MV) to select an appropriate initial candidate. Moreover, we introduce a search procedure that reduces the number of thresholds and simplifies the early termination conditions for the determination of a final MV. The experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves substantial speedup compared with the conventional methods including the motion vector field adaptive search technique (MVFAST) and predictive MVFAST (PMVFAST). The proposed algorithm also improves the PSNR values by increasing the correlation between the MVs, compared with the FS method.

• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.62-67
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• 2017

In this paper, we propose a fast motion estimation algorithm which is important in performance of video encoding. Even though so many fast algorithms for motion estimation have been published due to tremendous computational amount of full search algorithm, efforts for reducing computations of motion estimation still remain. In the paper, we propose an algorithm that reduces unnecessary computations only, while keeping prediction quality the same as that of the full search. The proposed algorithm does not calculate block matching error for each candidate directly to find motion vectors but divides the calculation procedure into several steps and calculates partial sum of block errors for candidates with high priority. By doing that, we can find the minimum error point early and get the enhancement of calculation speed by reducing unnecessary computations. The proposed algorithm uses smaller computations than conventional fast search algorithms with the same prediction quality as the full search algorithm.

• 전자공학회논문지 IE
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• v.43 no.2
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• pp.49-53
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• 2006

A fast motion-estimation algorithm based on regulated partial block distortions is proposed. The proposed algorithm can obtain very accurate motion vectors with a small computational load. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme provides very close performance to the full search while it is about 6 to 28 times faster than the full search.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 1998.10a
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• pp.887-890
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• 1998

We present a novel multi-resolution block matching algorithm (BMA) for fast motion estimation. At the coarsest level, a full search BMA (FSBMA) is performed for searching complex or random motion. Concurrently, spatial correlation of motion vector (MV) field is used for searching continuous motion. Here we present an efficient method for searching full resolution MVs without MV decimation even at the coarsest leve. After the coarsest level search, two or three initial MV candidates are chosen for the next level. At the further levels, the MV candidates are refined within much smaller search areas. Simulation results show that in comparison with FSBMA, the proposed BMA achieves a speed-up factor over 710 with minor PSNR degradation of 0.2dB at most, under a normal MPEG2 coding environment. Furthermore, our scheme is also suitable for hardware implementation due to regular data-flow.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2000.11d
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• pp.167-170
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• 2000

In this paper, we present a fast algorithm for the motion estimation using the efficient selection of an initial search position. In the method, we select the initial search position using the motion vector from the subsmpled images, the predicted motion vector from the neighbor blocks, and the (0,0) motion vector. While searching the candidate blocks, we use the spiral search pattern with the successive elimination algorithm(SEA) and the partial distortion elimination(PDE). The experiment results show that the complexity of the proposed algorithm is about 2∼3 times faster than the three-step search(TSS) with the PSNR loss of just 0.05［dB］∼0.1［dB］ than the full search algorithm PSNR. The search complexity can be reduced with quite a few PSNR loss by controling the number of the depth in the spiral search pattern.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2010.06a
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• pp.246-247
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• 2010

This paper proposes a fast motion estimation algorithm based on motion speed and multiple initial center points. The proposed method predicts initial search points by means of the spatio-temporal neighboring motion vectors. A dynamic search pattern based on motion speed and the predicted initial center points is proposed to quickly obtain the motion vector. Due to the usage of the spatio-temporal information and the dynamic search pattern, the proposed method greatly accelerates the search speed while maintaining a good predicted image quality. Experimental results show that the proposed method has a good predicted image quality in terms of PSNR with less search time as compared to the Full Search, New Three-Step Search, and Four-Step Search.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2009.10a
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• pp.945-949
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• 2009

This paper proposes an enhanced motion estimation that is one of core parts affecting the coding performance and visual quality in video coding. Although the full search technique, which is the most basic method of the motion estimation, presents the best visual quality, its computational complexity is great, since the search procedures to find the best matched block with each block in the current frame are carried out for all points inside the search area. Thus, various fast algorithms to reduce the computational complexity and maintain good visual quality have been proposed. The PMVFAST adopted the MPEG-4 visual standard produces the visual quality near that by the full search technique with the reduced computational complexity. In this paper, we propose a new motion vector prediction method using median processing. The proposed method reduces the computational complexity for the motion estimation significantly. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is faster than the PMVFAST and better than the full search in terms of search speed and average PSNR, respectively.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.32 no.10
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• pp.949-955
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• 2005

In this Paper, we propose fast block matching algorithm by dividing complex areas based on complexity order of reference block and square sub-block to reduce an amount of computation of full starch(FS) algorithm for fast motion estimation, while keeping the same prediction quality compared with the full search algorithm. By using the fact that matching error is proportional to the gradient of reference block, we reduced unnecessary computations with square sub-block adaptive matching scan based image complexity instead of conventional sequential matching scan and row/column based matching scan. Our algorithm reduces about $30\%$ of computations for block matching error compared with the conventional partial distortion elimination(PDE) algorithm without any prediction quality, and our algorithm will be useful in real-time video coding applications using MPEG-4 AVC or MPEG-2.