Adaptive Search Area Selection of Variable Block-Size Motion Estimation of H.264/AVC Video Coding Standard

The variable block size motion estimation is the most time consuming part of H.264/AVC encoder. In order to reduce the computation of motion estimation module, this paper presents a novel adaptive search area decision method by utilizing the information of the previously computed motion vectors (MVs). The direction of picture movement of the previously computed blocks is also considered for search area selection. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm provides significant improvement of coding speed with negligible objective quality degradation compared to the full search motion estimation method adopted by H.264/AVC reference software.