Efficient Temporal Search Range Prediction for Motion Estimation in H.264

An efficient search range prediction method is proposed to reduce the complexity of motion search in the H.264 video coding standard in this work. The main idea is to predict the temporal search range by modeling the relationship between the rate-distortion (RD) coding gain and the required computational complexity. The proposed algorithm first predicts the temporal search range to maximize the ratio of the expected RD coding gain and the normalized computational cost. Then, fast motion search is performed within the predicted search range with some early termination rule. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can save approximately 63-75% of the encoding complexity in motion estimation of H.264 (JM9.3) with negligible degradation in the RD performance