A fast hierarchical motion vector estimation algorithm using mean pyramid

In transmitting moving pictures, interframe coding is shown to be effective for compressing video data. A hierarchical motion vector estimation algorithm using mean pyramid is proposed. Using the same measurement window at each level of a pyramid, the proposed algorithm, based on the tree pruning, reduces the computational complexity greatly with its performance comparable to that of the full search (FS). By varying the number of candidate motion vectors which are to be used as the initial search points for motion vector estimation at the next level, the mean squared error of the proposed algorithm varies, ranging between those of the FS and three step search (TSS) methods. Also, depending on the number of candidate motion vectors, the computational complexity of the proposed hierarchical algorithm ranges from 1/8-1/2 of that of the FS. The computer simulation results of the proposed technique compared with the conventional methods are given for various test sequences