• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
• /
• v.48 no.1
• /
• pp.64-70
• /
• 2011

In an H.264/AVC video encoder, the motion estimation at fractional pixel accuracy improves a coding efficiency and image quality. However, it requires additional computation overheads for fractional search and interpolation, and thus, reducing the computation complexity of fractional search becomes more important. This paper proposes a Pixel Re-composition Fractional Motion Estimation (PRFME) algorithm for an H.264/AVC video encoder. Fractional Motion Estimation performs interpolation for the overlapped pixels which increases the computational complexity. PRFME can reduce the computational complexity by eliminating the overlapped pixel interpolation. Compared with the fast full search, the proposed algorithm can reduce 18.1% of computational complexity, meanwhile, the maximum PSNR degradation is less than 0.067dB. Therefore, the proposed PRFME algorithm is quite suitable for mobile applications requiring low power and complexity.