Fast block-based motion estimation using integral frames

Block-based motion estimation is widely used in video compression for exploitation of video temporal redundancy. Although effective, the process is arguably the most computationally intensive part of a typical video encoder. To speed up the process, a large number of fast block-matching algorithms (BMAs) have been proposed for motion estimation by limiting the number of search locations or simplifying the measure of match between two blocks under comparison. In this paper we propose a new BMA that measures the match by using the block sum of pixel values, a quantity that can be easily computed from an integral frame. Experimental results show that the proposed BMA can reduce notably the computational load and achieve compression performance very close to that of existing BMAs using conventional block-matching measures.