A fast block motion estimation algorithm with multi-directional adaptation

Since the block motion estimation in current video compressions standards has a very high computational complexity and is not suitable for real-time applications, a new fast block motion estimation algorithm with multidirectional adaptation is proposed in this paper. This algorithm first wisely judges the motion type of current encoding block. Then, according to the motion type, different search strategies and search patterns are intelligently employed. Moreover, horizontal cross search pattern, vertical cross search pattern, diagonal cross search pattern, and anti-diagonal cross search pattern are proposed, and are intelligently selected and executed for multidirectional searching to fast track the location of the minimum rate-distortion cost, recursively. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has much less execution time than the existing algorithms, with about the same accuracy.