Enhanced Hexagonal-Based Search Using Direction-Oriented Inner Search for Motion Estimation

The newly developed enhanced hexagonal-based search using point-oriented inner search (EHS-POIS) enormously speeds up hexagon-based search (HS). From a different perspective, an inherent correlation between distortion and spatial direction through statistical analysis is found. Based on the observed distortion distribution, a novel enhanced hexagonal-based search with direction-oriented inner search (EHS-DIOS) is proposed to avoid real distortion calculation and thus reduce high computation. Experimental results show that, the proposed algorithm is faster than EHS-POIS by achieving two times improvement in terms of inner search speed, and as compared with previous works, it makes a better tradeoff between speed and decoded image quality.