• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.57-65
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• 2004

In the block matching algorithm, search patterns of different shapes or sizes and the distribution of motion vectors have a large impact on both the searching speed and the image quality. In this paper, we propose a new fast block matching algorithm using the unit-diamond search pattern and the flat-hexagon search pattern. Our algorithm first finds the motion vectors that are close to the center of search window using the unit-diamond search pattern, and then fastly finds the other motion vectors that are not close to the center of search window using the flat-hexagon search pattern. Through experiments, compared with the hexagon-based search algorithm(HEXBS), the proposed unit-diamond and flat-hexagonal pattern search algorithm(UDFHS) improves as high as 11∼51% in terms of average number of search point per motion vector estimation and improves about 0.05∼0.74㏈ in terms of PSNR(Peak Signal to Noise Ratio).