• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.44 no.3
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• pp.16-22
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• 2007

Motion Estimation time in the H.264 has a large portion of encoding time and must be improved for real time application. Most of proposed motion estimation algorithm including Sub-pixel search use the fast search algorithm to speed up motion estimation by targeting the performance of full search in the reference code. This paper proposes a novel fast sub-pixel search control algorithm for H.264 encoder by using neighbor motion vector after analyzing the encoded Motion vector of video sequence. In addition the horizontal/vertical searching method is proposed with the horizontal/vertical directionality of motion vector. And the evaluation is performed with the proposed algorithms and other reference algorithms.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.40 no.2
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• pp.20-28
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• 2003

Recently we need a faster and more accurate motion vector search algorithm for ASIC(Application Specific IC) or small systems. Block motion estimation using Full Search(FS) algorithm provides the best visual quality and PSNR, but it requires intensive computations. The previously proposed fast algorithms reduced the number of computations by limiting the number of searching locations. This is accomplished at the expense of less accuracy of motion estimation and gives rise to an appreciably higher SAD(Sum of Absolute Difference) for motion compensated images. In this paper we exploit the spatial correlation of motion vectors and present a fast motion estimation scheme which uses the predicted motion vector(PMV). The PMV scheme is more clear and simpler than the previously proposed algorithms which also use adjacent motion vectors. Simulation results with standard video sequences show that the PMV scheme is faster and more accurate than other algorithms such as Nearest-Neighbors Search(NNS) algorithm.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.31 no.11C
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• pp.1077-1084
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• 2006

This paper proposed a fast algorithm to reduce the amount of calculation for inter prediction which takes a great deal of the operational time in H.264/AVC. This algorithm decides a search range according to the direction of predicted motion vector, and then performs an adaptive spiral search for the candidates with JM(Joint Model) FME(Fast Motion Estimation) which employs the rate-distortion optimization(RDO) method. Simultaneously, it decides a threshold cost value for each of the variable block sizes and performs the motion estimation for the variable search ranges with the threshold. These activities reduce the great amount of the complexity in inter prediction encoding. Experimental results by applying the proposed method .to various video sequences showed that the process time was decreased up to 80% comparing to the previous prediction methods. The degradation of video quality was only from 0.05dB to 0.19dB and the compression ratio decreased as small as 0.58% in average. Therefore, we are sure that the proposed method is an efficient method for the fast inter prediction.

• Journal of the Korea Computer Industry Society
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• v.4 no.10
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• pp.731-740
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• 2003

Since motion estimation remove the redundant data to employ the temporal correlations between adjacent frames in a video sequence, it plays an important role in digital video coding. And in the block matching algorithm, search patterns of different shapes or sizes and the distribution of motion vectors have a large impact on both the searching speed and the image quality. In this paper, we propose a new fast block matching algorithm using the small-cross search pattern and the block-based gradient descent search pattern. Our algorithm first finds the motion vectors that are close to the center of search window using the small-cross search pattern, and then quickly finds the other motion vectors that are not close to the center of search window using the block-based gradient descent search pattern. Through experiments, compared with the block-based gradient descent search algorithm(BBGDS), the proposed search algorithm improves as high as 26-40% in terms of average number of search point per motion vector estimation.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.41 no.6
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• pp.209-220
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• 2004

The main feature of H.264 standard against conventional video standards is the high coding efficiency and the network friendliness. In spite of these outstanding features, it is not easy to implement H.264 codec as a real-time system due to its high requirement of memory bandwidth and intensive computation. Although the variable block size motion compensation using multiple reference frames is one of the key coding tools to bring about its main performance gain, it demands substantial computational complexity due to SAD (Sum of Absolute Difference) calculation among all possible combinations of coding modes to find the best motion vector. For speedup of motion estimation process, therefore, this paper proposes fast algorithms for both integer-pel and fractional-pel motion search. Since many conventional fast integer-pel motion estimation algorithms are not suitable for H.264 having variable motion block sizes, we propose the motion field adaptive search using the hierarchical block structure based on the diamond search applicable to variable motion block sizes. Besides, we also propose fast fractional-pel motion search using small diamond search centered by predictive motion vector based on statistical characteristic of motion vector.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.8 no.7
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• pp.889-897
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• 2005

This paper presents a new fast motion estimation algorithm for multi-reference frames. We first analyze the experimental results of the successive elimination algorithm, which is a fast version of full search algorithm, being applied to Multi-reference frames. Based on the analysis, a new scheme for alleviating its computational burden is introduced. In the proposed method, the motion vector for the immediately previous reference frame is found by applying the successive elimination algorithm, while the motion vector for other reference frames is estimated by extrapolation of the already obtained motion vector. Adaptively restricting the motion search area to the local area centered on the estimated motion vector, the proposed method provides dramatic computational complexity reduction but slight quality degradation. The proposed method is evaluated by experiments for some image sequences.

• 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.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.2 no.7
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• pp.495-502
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• 2013

Motion estimation (ME) that limits the performance of image quality and encoding speed has been developed to reduce temporal redundancy in video sequences and plays an important role in digital video compression. But it is computational demanding part of the encoder. Multi-view video is obtained by capturing one three-dimensional scene with many cameras at different positions. ME for Multi-view video requires high computational complexity. To reduce computational complexity and maintain the image quality, a fast motion estimation method is proposed in this paper. The proposed method uses a hierarchical search strategy. This strategy method consists of modified diamond search patten, multi gird diamond search pattern, and raster search pattern. These search patterns place search points symmetrically and evenly that can cover the overall search area not to fall into the local minimum or exploits the characteristics of the distribution of motion vectors to place the search points. Experiment results show that the speedup improvement of the proposed method over TZ search method (JMVC) can be up to 1.2 ~3 times faster while maintaining similar video quality and bit rates.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.24 no.9A
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• pp.1392-1400
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• 1999

In this paper, we propose a two-stage fast full search algorithm for block motion estimation that produces the same performance to that of full search algorithm (FSA) but with remarkable computation reduction. The proposed algorithm uses the search region subsampling and the difference of adjacent pixels in the current block. In the first stage, we subsample the search region by a factor of 9, and then calculate mean absolute error (MAE) at the subsampled search points. And in the second stage, we reduce the search points that need block matching process by using the lower bound of MAE value at each search Point. We Set the lower bound of MAE value for each search point from the MAE values which are calculated at the first stage and the difference of adjacent pixels in the current block. The experimental results show that we can reduce the computational complexity considerably without any degradation of picture quality.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.34 no.3
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• pp.369-378
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• 2012

In this paper, we propose new adaptive search range motion estimation methods where the search ranges are constrained by the probabilities of motion vector differences and a search point sampling technique is applied to the constrained search ranges. Our new methods are based on our previous work, in which the search ranges were analytically determined by the probabilities. Since the proposed adaptive search range motion estimation methods effectively restrict the search ranges instead of search point sampling patterns, they provide a very flexible and hardware-friendly approach in motion estimation. The proposed methods were evaluated and tested with JM16.2 of the H.264/AVC video coding standard. Experiment results exhibit that with negligible degradation in PSNR, the proposed methods considerably reduce the computational complexity in comparison with the conventional methods. In particular, the combined method provides performance similar to that of the hybrid unsymmetrical-cross multi-hexagon-grid search method and outstanding merits in hardware implementation.