A New Hybrid Search Scheme for Video Motion Estimation

Abstract

For video compression problems inter frame prediction is well exploited by motion estimation algorithms, where the temporal redundancy between the successive frames are effectively removed. In order to alleviate computational complexity, several block-based fast motion estimation algorithms have been proposed. The efficiency of such algorithms largely depends on the low-resolution coarse search and fine resolution inner search to recognize the slow and fast movements of the object. This paper suggests a hybrid motion compensation technique (H-MCT) based on Cross Diamond Search (CDS) and Efficient Three Step Search (E3SS) algorithms, which effectively detect the slow and fast movements with less computation time. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated in terms of two matching criteria, namely sum of absolute difference (SAD) and mean absolute difference (MAD) as well as the fidelity measure, peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). Experimental results show that the proposed scheme performs better than state-of-the-art algorithms such as CDS and E3SS by utilizing less number of search points.