A New Fast Motion Estimation Method for H.264

Compared with previous video standards, the computational complexity of H.264/AVC is extraordinarily high due to newly adopted tools such as variable block size motion estimation, To reduce the high computational demands of H.264 coding standard, a hierarchical search strategy for ME is proposed by the deep research of the characteristics of motion estimation. This strategy consists of improved unsymmetrical cross search pattern, multi-square grid search pattern, hexagon search pattern and small diamond search pattern. This hybrid search strategy has strong adaptability to apply in a wide range of size of motion sequences. It can cover overall search area not to fall into the local minimum and can reduce the complexity. Experiment results show that the speedup improvement of the proposed method over unsymmetrical-cross Multi-Hexagon grid Search (UMHexagonS) can be up to 1.2 times faster. Compared to FS, this method shows an average PSNR drop of 0.01 dB while showing an average PSNR gain 0.01 dB in comparison to UMHexagonS.