Lossy Strict Multilevel Successive Elimination Algorithm for Fast Motion Estimation

This paper present a simple and effective method to further reduce the search points in the multilevel successive elimination algorithm (MSEA). Because the sea values for most of the best matching search positions are much smaller than the current minimum SAD, we can simply increase the calculated sea value to increase the elimination ratio without much affecting the coding efficiency. Compared with the MSEA algorithm, experiments show that the proposed strict MSEA algorithm (SMSEA) can provides almost 6.5 times speedup with stable image quality, which is better than diamond search (DS). In practice, the proposed technique can also be used in the fine granularity SEA (FGSE) algorithm and the calculation process can be traced by analogy