A study of fast motion estimation algorithm for H.264 video coding standard

• Main Authors: Chia-jung Lo, 羅家容
• Other Authors: Chou-chen Wang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2006
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/90026773730929317954

碩士 === 義守大學 === 電子工程學系碩士班 === 94 === The H.264/AVC video coding standard aims to provide significant improvement in coding efficiency, compared with previous coding standards such as H.261/H.263 and MPEG-1/2/4. To achieve the target of high video quality and compression ratio, H.264 develops some new techniques such as intra prediction, variable block sizes motion estimation (ME), quarter-sample motion vector accuracy, multiple reference frames, integer discrete cosine transform (DCT) and content adaptive binary arithmetic code (CABAC) and deblocking filter. H.264 uses 7 variable block sizes ranging from 16x16 to 4x4 in inter frame coding. The motion estimation (ME) with 7 modes needs very high computational complexity. To reduce the complexity of ME module in H.264, we propose a new and fast motion-estimation algorithm based on partial block distortion for sorted significant features including bit-plane and absolute difference of means (ADM). The partial distortion elimination (PDE) algorithm, from top-to-bottom line or sub-block matching scan, is a popular method for full search (FS) in H.264. When the proposed algorithm is combined with the sub-block PDE (proposed-PDE), it can find the same motion vectors as FFS. Furthermore, when the proposed algorithm is combined with the normalized partial distortion search (proposed-NPDS), it can obtain relatively accurate motion vectors with a large reduced computational load. Simulation results show that the proposed-PDE method requires about 90% of the computation needed by the FFS in H.264 without any loss of R-D performance, and the proposed-NPDS requires only about 68% of the computation needed by the FFS with the very close R-D performance.