A New Motion Estimation Scheme Using an Adaptive Block Matching Algorithm

In the block matching for the video compression, there is the spatial correlation of the video sequence between the motion vectors of current blocks. In this paper, we propose the enhanced fast block matching algorithm using the spatial correlation of the video sequence and the center-biased property of motion vectors. The proposed algorithm determines an exact motion vector using the predicted motion vector from the adjacent macro blocks of the current frame and the Cross- Hexagonal search pattern. The proposed Enhanced Cross-Hexagonal Search (ECHS) algorithm employs the halfway-stop technique and finds small motion vectors with fewer search points than the hexagon-based search (HEXBS) algorithm and the CDS algorithm while maintaining similar or even better search quality. The improvement of ECHS over HEXBS and CDS can be up to a 38~58% gain on speedup. Experimental results show that the ECHS provides faster searching speed and smaller distortions than other popular fast blockmatching algorithms.