An efficient and regular motion estimation algorithm for MPEG4-AVC/H.264 coding

In the new version reference software JM9.2 of H.264 standard, the UMHexagonS motion estimation algorithm is adopted to find the best motion vector for video coding. The hybrid search strategies have significantly outperformed other algorithms (FS, 3TT, 4TT, DS, ..., etc.). However the highly computational complexity leads the codec to become too complex and hard to be implemented in real time applications. In this work, we propose an efficient algorithm by using the precision initial search and simple search strategies to finish the motion estimation. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method can obtain good performances. Through the proposed features, the coding performance can be improved significantly, and the computation complexity of the integer pixel motion estimation of H.264 is also decreased tremendously.