Two-layer motion estimation algorithm for video coding

A novel two-layer motion estimation which searches motion vectors on two layers with partial distortion measures in order to reduce the overwhelming computational complexity of motion estimation (ME) in video coding is proposed. A layer is an image which is derived from the reference frame such that the summation of a block of pixels in the reference frame determines the point of a layer. It has been noted on different video sequences that many motion vectors on the layers are the same as those searched on the reference frame. Experimental results on a wide variety of video sequences show that the proposed algorithm achieves both fast speed and good motion prediction quality when compared with the state-of-the-art fast block matching algorithms.