Novel fractional motion estimation algorithm and architecture using Sub-block Combination

This paper presents a Sub-block Combination Fractional Motion Estimation (SCFME) algorithm and its architecture for an H.264/AVC video encoder. Unlike typical FME algorithms, SCFME can eliminate the overlapped pixel interpolation, and thus, it can reduce the computational complexity. Compared with the JM reference software, the proposed algorithm can reduce up to 69.75% of the number of pixels for fractional search. In addition, the PSNR of SCFME decreases less than 0.067dB in average. The implementation results show that this architecture can achieve 230MHz with only 22.8K gates excluding memory.