Adaptive Motion Estimation Block Matching Algorithms for Video Coding

In most block-based video coding systems, the fast block matching algorithms (BMAs) use the origin as the initial search center, which may not track the motion very well. To improve the accuracy of the fast BMAs, a new adaptive motion tracking search algorithm is proposed in this paper. Based on the spatial correlation of motion blocks, a predicted starting search point, which reflects the motion trend of the current block, is adaptively chosen. It does not have the problem of being trapped by local minimum, and is characterized by finding the majority motion vector in one step. When compared with six other block-based search algorithms including the full-search and three-step-search, the new algorithm has an average PSNR very close to that of full search, yet an average search time faster than the three step-search