Motion Estimation with Optical Flow-based Adaptive Search Region

An optical flow-based motion estimation algorithm is proposed for video coding. The algorithm uses block-matching motion estimation with an adaptive search region. The search region is computed from motion fields that are estimated based on the optical flow. The algorithm is based on the fact that true block-motion vectors have similar characteristics to optical flow vectors. Thereafter, the search region is computed using these optical flow vectors that include spatial relationships. In conventional block matching, the search region is fixed. In contrast, in the new method, the appropriate size and location of the search region are both decided by the proposed algorithm. The results obtained using test images show that the proposed algorithm can produce a significant improvement compared with previous block-matching algorithms.