Skin region based method for reducing motion estimation time

Video compression algorithms are time consuming processes. A key part of video compression algorithms which is also time consuming is motion estimation (ME) and computation of motion vectors (MVs). During this process, a series of candidate blocks should be searched to find the best motion vectors. In this paper, we propose a method for reducing the motion estimation process time. The idea of our method is to compare skin regions of candidate blocks with current frame block and skipping some candidate blocks during the search. We propose some conditions for comparing the skin regions of two blocks and describe how we can check these conditions quickly. Our method provides two parameters that can be used to create a balance between the processing time and the motion estimation accuracy.