Fast variable block-size motion estimation algorithm based on merge and slit procedures for H.264/MPEG-4 AVC

This paper proposes and investigates fast variable block-size motion estimation algorithms based on merge and split procedure for H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video encoding. The algorithms take advantage of the correlation of the motion vectors (MVs) of the different block-size modes, to achieve good computation reduction. Experimental results show that the number of search point can be reduced to about 4% of that using full-search motion estimation, with negligible quality degradation.