Fast motion estimation based on adaptive search range adjustment and matching error prediction

This work presents fast motion estimation (ME) by using both an adaptive search range adjustment and a matching error prediction. The basic idea of the proposed scheme is based on adjusting a given search range adaptively and predicting a block matching errors effectively. The adaptive search range adjustment is first performed by analyzing the contents of a scene. Next, the total block matching error is estimated by using partial errors of sub-sampled blocks to eliminate invalid blocks earlier for ME. In order to evaluate the proposed scheme, several baseline approaches are described and compared. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can reduce the computational cost more than 81% for ME at the cost of 0.01 dB image quality degradation versus the conventional PDE algorithm1. The main contributions of the proposed approach are that 1) it can reduce the computational cost considerably; 2) it can be applied to conventional PDE algorithms without significant changes; and 3) it can be a useful tool for fast ME in the consumer electronics-related field.