Multilevel motion estimation based on distortion measure in transform domain

A transform-domain successive elimination algorithm for block-based motion estimation (ME) is proposed. First, a method is introduced for calculating the sum of squared differences in the transform domain. Then, based on this method, a new transform-domain criterion is proposed to eliminate impossible candidates as early as possible. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm speeds up the ME process by up to a factor of 10 compared with the conventional full search algorithm.