Statistical approach for motion estimation skipping (SAMEK)

High Efficient Video Coding (HEVC) standard has achieved significant rate-distortion improvement over the previous standard H.264/AVC. However, the complexity that comes from its flexible data structure representation is an obstacle for its wide application. To reduce the overall complexity and encoding time, this paper proposes a statistical approach for motion estimation skipping (SAMEK). The SAMEK method avoids some unnecessary motion estimations in units with less probability of being referenced. These units can be recognized by the two rules of SAMEK method, namely ZeroCase and DecreaseCase. These two rules are summarized by statistically analyzing the relationships between each PU and its references. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can save up to 9.5% encoding time (averagely 6.87%) with negligible rate-distortion losses (averagely 0.006 dB) when compared with HEVC encoder with Test Zone search (TZ search) enabled.