H.264 search window size algorithm for fast and efficient video coding with single pixel precision and no background estimation for motion detection

Abstract

H.264 is the video standard needed for new high band requests of multimedia services such as video on demand, videoconference or videosurveillance. These applications require high video quality with the lowest possible band occupation. The new video coding standard H.264 seems to be answer to fulfill these requirements.Anyway, while fulfilling the requested quality-bandwidth ratio, the H.264 encoder complexity is largely increased if compared with previous standards, mainly because of the high computational cost of the Motion Estimation (ME) module that is the core of this standard video encoder.In this paper, we propose an enhancement to our innovative algorithm for a further complexity reduction of the ME module. The main idea is to make dynamically modifiable a previously static H.264 coder parameter: the size of the search window in ME. A Faster Motion Detection (MD) module, pixel precise and without background estimation, has been added to the video coder in order to compute the search window size. Moreover this method is valid for every kind of video stream and not only for sequences having a static background, thanks to the pixel precision of the motion detection.In the proposed solution, the reduction of the number of calculated SAD (Sum-of-Absolute-Differences) allows to decrease the encoder complexity both in low and high complex sequences. This paper illustrates the behavior of the Search Window Estimation (SWE) algorithm in both the old and the new algorithm version. The obtained results are then compared with jm86 full search and fast ME using different quantization values.

Motion Detection and Projection Based Block Motion Estimation Using the Radon Transform for Video Coding

“…This is mainly due to the great number of calculation in motion estimation. Having this in mind, the present study postulates motion detection for fast and efficient video coding (Bailo et al, 2006). Many algorithms are suggested in the literature to reduce the number of calculation intended for motion estimation based on spatial and temporal correlation of motion vector (Nakaya and Harashima, 1994;Korada and Krishna, 2001;Nam et al, 2000a).…”