Fast multiple reference frame motion estimation for H.264/AVC

Multiple reference frame motion compensation is a new feature introduced in H.264/MPEG-4 AVC to improve video coding performance. However, the computational cost of multiple reference frame motion estimation (MRF-ME) is very high. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that takes into account the correlation/continuity of motion vectors among different reference frames. We show that the algorithm effectively reduces the computations of MRF-ME, and achieves similar coding gain compared to the motion search approaches in the reference software