Advanced Motion Estimation Techniques for VC-1

The SMPTE standard 421 M, commonly known as VC-1, is a state-of-the-art video compression format that provides highly competitive video quality, from very low through very high bit rates, at a reasonable computational complexity. VC-1 has many differences previous standards such as MPEG-2 and H.264/AVC. In this paper, we implement four different motion estimation techniques. These techniques are well known in the video compression world, but have a different effect on each video codec. The effect in VC-1 is shown as an increase in speed and a gain, on average, in the signal-to-noise ratio.