A motion estimation algorithm based on Predictive Intensive Direction Search for H.264/AVC

Motion estimation is the most computationally intensive element in a block based video codec. In this paper, a novel Predictive Intensive Direction Searching (PIDS) algorithm is proposed to reduce the computational load of H.264/AVC video codec. Based on the direction of predicted motion vector, the search area is adaptively divided into one region of intensive-direction-searching and several regions of´ coarse-direction-searching. Then the extended hexagon search is used to refine the final optimal motion vector. The experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm achieves a reduction of 15% motion estimation time, while incurring only 0.5% increment on the bite rate compared with that of UMHexagonS algorithm, which is adopted by the H.264/AVC reference software.