• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2000.07a
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• pp.7-10
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• 2000

Fast block motion estimation technique is proposed to reduce the computational complexity in video coding. In the conventional methods the size of search region is fixed. For small motion regions like background the small size of sea of search region is enough to find a block motion. But for active motion regions the large size of search region is preferred to figure out the accurate motion vector. Therefore, it is reasonable that a block motion is estimated in the variable search region (both the size and the position of it). That is to say, the search region varies according to the predicted motion characteristics of a block. The block motion in video frames has temporal continuity and then the search region of a current block is predicted using the block motion of previous blocks. The computational complexity of the proposed technique is significantly reduced with a good picture quality compared to the conventional methods.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2003.11a
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• pp.433-436
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• 2003

In this paper, the efficient motion estimation and compensation method for 3 dimensional wavelet transform is proposed. Recently, since the compression performance and scalable functionality are provided by wavelet transform, many researches have been carried out for applying to the video compression. For the temporal filtering, motion estimation and compensation techniques are used, but the unconnected pixels, which are produced by motion compensation result into the degradation of coding performance and quality of the picture. For the efficient motion compensated temporal filtering by reducing the number of these unconnected pixels, we propose the variable block size motion estimation and compensation method. Also we propose a method that determines the block size using rate-distortion optimization technique according to the local characteristics of the frame. The simulation results show the improved performances than the MPEG-4 scalable coding methods and the 3 dimensional wavelet coding methods using fixed block size motion estimation and compensation.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.111-114
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• 2016

In HEVC, motion estimation is performed independently for each variable block size. So it requires several times of search window data, and also it is difficult to exploit early termination. In this paper, a new method is proposed to exploit search window data and early termination in variable block size. When applied to TZS algorithm, it reduces pixel comparison and search window data accesses to 1/3.7 ~ 1/2.9 with negligible image quality degradation.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2008.06a
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• pp.807-808
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• 2008

In H.264, sub-pel motion estimation (ME) has strong effect when coding video sequences. 1/4-pel performs better at low bitrate while 1/8-pel gives better results at high bitrate. In this paper, a variable sub-pixel motion vector resolution based on block mode motion estimation method is proposed. Experiment results show that the proposed method can take the advantage of 1/4-pel at low bitrate and 1/8-pel at high bitrate. In addition to that, time is reduced from 14% to 53% compared to KTA1.3 with 1/8-pel motion vector (MV) resolution.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.45 no.6
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• pp.1-8
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• 2008

This paper introduces three efficient frame selection schemes to reduce the computation complexity for the multi-reference and variable block size Motion Estimation (ME). The proposed RSP (Reference Selection Pass) scheme can minimize the overhead of frame selection. The MFS (Modified Frame Selection) scheme can reduce the number of search points about 18% compared with existing schemes considering the motion of image during the reference frame selection process. In addition, the TPRFS (Two Pass Reference frame Selection) scheme can minimize the frame selection operation for the variable block size ME in H.264/AVC using the character of selected reference frame according to the block size. The simulation results show the proposed schemes can save up to 50% of the ME computation without degradation of image Qualify. Because the proposed schemes can be separated from the block matching process, they can be used with any existing single reference fast search algorithms.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.32 no.11C
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• pp.1066-1072
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• 2007

In this paper, we propose a fast multiple reference frame selection method for motion estimation and compensation in video coding. Reference frames selected as an optimal reference frame by variable block sizes motion estimation have the statistical characteristic that was based on block size. Using the statistical characteristic, reference frames for smaller block size motion estimation can be selected from reference frame which was decided as an optimal one for the upper layer block size. Simulation results show that the proposal method decreased the computations about 60%. Nevertheless, PSNR and bit rate were almost same as the performances of original H.264 multiple reference motion estimation.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.41 no.6
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• pp.209-220
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• 2004

The main feature of H.264 standard against conventional video standards is the high coding efficiency and the network friendliness. In spite of these outstanding features, it is not easy to implement H.264 codec as a real-time system due to its high requirement of memory bandwidth and intensive computation. Although the variable block size motion compensation using multiple reference frames is one of the key coding tools to bring about its main performance gain, it demands substantial computational complexity due to SAD (Sum of Absolute Difference) calculation among all possible combinations of coding modes to find the best motion vector. For speedup of motion estimation process, therefore, this paper proposes fast algorithms for both integer-pel and fractional-pel motion search. Since many conventional fast integer-pel motion estimation algorithms are not suitable for H.264 having variable motion block sizes, we propose the motion field adaptive search using the hierarchical block structure based on the diamond search applicable to variable motion block sizes. Besides, we also propose fast fractional-pel motion search using small diamond search centered by predictive motion vector based on statistical characteristic of motion vector.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.40 no.4
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• pp.275-285
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• 2003

The now video coding standard H.264 employs variable block size motion compensation, multiple references, and quarter-pel motion vector accuracy. These techniques are key features to accomplish higher coding gain, however, at the same time main factors that increase overall computational complexity. Therefore, in order to apply H.264 to many applications, key techniques are requested to improve their speed. For this reason, we propose a fast motion estimation which is suited for variable block size motion communication. In addition, we propose a fast mode decision method to choose the best mode at early stage. Experimental results show the reduction of the number of SAT SATD calculations by a factor of 4.5 and 2.6 times respectively, when we compare the proposed fast motion estimation and the conventional MVFAS $T^{［8-10］}$. Besides, the number of RDcost computations is reduced by about 45%. Therefore, the proposed methods reduces significantly its computational complexity without noticeable coding loss.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.21 no.11
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• pp.2768-2775
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• 1996

VariableBlock Matching algorithm is effective for the estimation of motion vector at complexor edge region by means of using variable block size with respect to the image block. But since VBM algorithm requires considerable number of operations, to solve this problem, we present an algorithm which uses difference images and quad tree structure, and estimates motion using various fast block matching algorithms.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.273-278
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• 2016

In HEVC variable block size motion estimation, same search window data are duplicatedly used in each block size. It increases memory bandwidth, and it is difficult to exploit early termination. In this paper, largest block size and its corresponding smaller block sizes with same positions are performed at the same time. It reduces memory bandwidth and computation by reusing search window data and computation results. In the early termination, image quality can be degraded when it determines early termination by observing largest block size only, since smaller block sizes cannot be equally terminated due to their relative positions. So, in this paper, processing order of early termination is changed to perform smaller block sizes in turns. The designed motion estimation engine was described in Verilog HDL and it was synthesized and verified in 0.18um process technology. Its gate count and maximum operating frequency are 36,101 gates and 263.15 MHz, respectively.