A Self-Adaptive and Fast Motion Estimation Search Method for H.264/AVC

H.264/AVC is the outstanding and significant video compression standard developed by ITU-T/ISO/IEC Joint Video Team. Motion estimation (ME) plays a key role in H.264/AVC, it concerns greatly on computational complexity especially when using the full search (FS) algorithm. Although many fast ME algorithms have been proposed to reduce the huge calculation complexity instead of FS, the ME still can not satisfy the critical real-time application´s needs. In this paper, a fast integer pixel variable block ME algorithm based on JVT which accepted UMHexagonS algorithm is presented for H.264/AVC encoder. With special considerations on the motion activity of the current macro-block, several adaptive search strategies have been utilized to significantly improve the video coding performance. The simulation results shows that the proposed algorithm maintains an unnoticeable quality loss in terms of PSNR on average compared with FS and reduces nearly 20% ME time compared with UMHexagonS while maintaining coding efficiency.