Adaptive block-matching algorithm for video compression

Block-matching motion estimation plays an important role in video coding. In this paper, we present an adaptive block-matching algorithm, which determines the candidate motion vectors and a dynamic search window based on the spatial and temporal neighbor blocks. According to the mean absolute error (MAE) based on these motion vectors, stop search, 3/spl times/3 neighbor window search and modified 3SS search in the dynamic window is applied adaptively. This method can significantly reduce search time while the performance is still maintained. Simulation results show the performance of this algorithm is very similar to that of the full search algorithm (FSA) and the computation complexity is smaller than that of 3SS and 4SS.