Locally refined Gray-coded bit-plane matching for block motion estimation

This paper presents Gray-coded bit-plane matching with local main absolute difference (MAD) refinement for block motion estimation. It is shown that through Gray-coded bit-plane matching it is possible to obtain a good estimate for the vicinity of the block motion vector. An overall performance close to full search MAD is achieved with local refinement around the best Gray-coded bit-plane match position. Gray-coded bit-plane matching is accomplished using Boolean Ex-Or operations only, hence the computational load is reduced compared to full search MAD based motion estimation.