A Fast Sub-pel Motion Estimation Scheme using a Parabolic SAD Model

Sub-pel level motion estimation contributes to significant increase in R-D performance for H.264|MPEG 4 Part 10 AVC. However, several supplements, such as interpolation, block matching, and Hadamard transform which entails large computational complexity of encoding process, are essential to find best matching block in sub-pel level motion estimation and compensation. In this paper, a fast motion estimation scheme in sub-pel accuracy is proposed based on a parabolic model of SAD to avoid such computational complexity. In the proposed scheme, motion estimation (ME) is only performed in integer-pel levels and the following sub-pel level motion vectors are found from the parametric SAD model for which the model parameters are estimated from the SAD values obtained in the integer-pel levels. Fall-back check is performed to ensure the validity of the parabolic SAD model with the estimated parameters. The experiment result shows that the proposed scheme can reduce the motion estimation time up to about 30% of the total ME times in average with negligible amount of PSNR drops (0.14dB in maximum) and bit increments (2.54%in maximum).