A content adaptive fast PDE algorithm for motion estimation based on matching error prediction

This paper introduces a new fast motion estimation based on estimating a block matching error (i.e., sum of absolute difference (SAD)) between blocks which can eliminate an impossible candidate block much earlier than a conventional partial distortion elimination (PDE) scheme. The basic idea of the proposed scheme is based on predicting the total SAD of a candidate block using its partial SAD. In particular, in order to improve prediction accuracy and computational efficiency, a sub-sample based block matching and a selective pixel-based approaches are employed. In order to evaluate the proposed scheme, several baseline approaches are described and compared. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can reduce the computations by about 44% for motion estimation at the cost of 0.0005 dB quality degradation versus the general PDE algorithm.