A limited hardware resources efficient motion estimation algorithm

This paper describes a new motion estimation search strategy that exploits spatio-temporal correlation of motion vector field to estimate any kind of sequences containing low/high spatial details and slow/fast moving objects. The proposed algorithm dynamically changes its searching strategy between a modified genetic search and a N-step search accordingly to the scene motion complexity and the specified processing power budget. An adaptive sub-sampled motion vector tracing among B-frames mechanism is provided that drastically improves the coding quality for a relative additional complexity (less than 25%) which gives better results than exhaustive search over large searching range in all CCIR601 sequences tested