Motion estimation based on spatio-temporal correlations

Motion estimation (ME) has been developed to remove redundant data contained in a sequence of image. And ME is an important part of video encoding systems, since it can significantly affect the output quality of an encoded sequences. However, ME requires a significant part of the encoding time, when using the full search (FS). For this reason, low complexity motion estimation algorithms are viable solutions. In this paper, we present an efficient algorithm based on exploiting temporally and spatially correlated motion information that defines the search pattern and the location of search center adaptively. Experiments show that the speedup improvement of the proposed algorithm over diamond search algorithm (DS) and motion vector field adaptive search technique (MVFAST) can be up to 0.5∼2 times faster and the image quality improvement can be better up to 0.1∼1(dB).