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A Fast Sub-pixel Motion Estimation Method for H.264 Video Compression  

Lee, Yun-Hwa (한양대학교 전자전기제어계측공학과)
Choi, Myung-Hoon (삼성전자 반도체 메모리사업부 플래시 메모리 개발팀)
Shin, Hyun-Chul (한양대학교 전자전기제어계측공학과)
Publication Information
Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications / v.33, no.4, 2006 , pp. 411-417 More about this Journal
Abstract
Motion Estimation (ME) is an important part of video coding process and it takes the largest amount of computation in video compression. Half-pixel and quarter-pixel motion estimation can improve the video compression rate at the cost of higher computational complexity In this paper, we suggest a new efficient low-complexity algorithm for half-pixel and quarter pixel motion estimation. It is based on the experimental results that the sum of absolute differences(SAD) shows parabolic shape and thus can be approximated by using interpolation techniques. The sub-pixel motion vector is searched from the minimum SAD integer-pixel motion vector. The sub-pixel search direction is determined toward the neighboring pixel with the lowest SAD among 8 neighbors. Experimental results show that more than 20% reduction in computation time can be achieved without affecting the quality of video.
Keywords
H.264 encoder; sub-pixel motion estimation; SAB; Video compression;
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