Region based searching for early terminated motion estimation algorithm of H.264/AVC video coding standard

H.264/AVC is the newest international video coding standard which shows extremely higher coding efficiency compared to any other previous standards, but it brings high computational complexity. The variable block size motion estimation process is the most time consuming part of the H.264/AVC encoder. In order to reduce the computation of the full search motion estimation method, this paper presents a region based search algorithm. The entire search window is divided into several search regions based on the orientation of the previously calculated motion vector. The experimental results show that the proposed method reduced about 77% of motion estimation time with ignorable degradation of rate-distortion performance.