A fast approach for geometry-adaptive block partitioning

State-of-the-art video compression standards such as H.264 employ tree-structured motion compensation by splitting macro-blocks into fixed square or rectangular sub-blocks. Although, this approach leads to improved compression performance, recent studies have shown that further gain can be achieved via slicing blocks with arbitrary line segments to better match the boundaries between moving objects. However, finding the best partition remains an extremely computationally-intensive task. In this paper, we propose a fast method to identify efficient partitions using a two-step search of the radius and angle of the line segment. Experimental results show that this scheme is able to identify efficient motion boundaries using less iterations than existing techniques while maintaining comparable performance.