Study of interpolation filters for motion estimation with application in H.264/AVC encoders

The current paper studies low-complexity image super-resolution techniques for improving the motion estimation process of video encoding. Aiming at speeding up the generation of candidate blocks during the computationally intensive search algorithm, we present interpolation techniques with reduced cost compared to standard 6-tap filtering procedures. Furthermore, we compare their performance to that of commonly used half-pixel interpolation techniques with respect to the resulting image quality and the processing time. The research has been based on using a typical fractional motion estimation algorithm preceding the processing of the H.264/AVC standard motion compensation, and thus, the research benefits the design of H.264/AVC encoders.