A New Spatio-Temporal Fast Motion Estimation Algorithm

Abstract

A new spatio-temporal approach is proposed for fast block motion estimation in video coding. The approach exploits the existing correlation of the spatio- temporal block neighborhood by utilizing the frequency of appearance of the neighborhood's motion vectors. Extensive simulations show that the proposed algorithm performs close to the full search algorithm (in terms of quality) with a significant computational gain. Under fine tuning of specific parameters, the algorithm becomes comparable to other fast search algorithms.