An enhanced three step search motion estimation method and its VLSI architecture

Recent studies show that the motion vector distribution within the search window is center-biased. Based on this fact, we propose in this paper an Enhanced version of the well-known three step search hierarchical block motion estimation method, specifically aiming towards the H.261 standards, and show that its performance is much better than the original, without any direct or hidden costs. We also propose a simple VLSI architecture to implement the proposed method on silicon with the minimum number of gates and extend it to implement the regular three step search method