An improved fast fractional pel motion estimation algorithm based on H.264

This paper presents an improved fast fractional pel motion estimation algorithm for H.264. First, to skip inefficient fractional pel search, smooth macro-block prediction algorithm is proposed. Then, to further reduce the computation load of H.264 fractional pel motion estimation, an extended diamond pattern search algorithm based on predicted motion vector is proposed. The simulation result shows that compared with the FFPS (Full Fractional Pel Search) algorithm, the proposed algorithm can save about 39.5% computation load of the whole motion estimation module only with PSNR degradation less than 0.189 dB.