A Novel 3-D Motion Estimation Algorithm for Multireference Frame in H.264/AVC

H.264/AVC achieves higher compression efficiency but needs more computational load comparing with previous video codecs. Motion estimation (ME) is the most time-consuming modules in encoder. Although lots of fast ME algorithms proposed before could be directly adopted, they are designed for just one reference frame and must be repeated several times when multi-reference frame are used. In this paper, we proposed a novel 3-D motion estimation algorithm, which considering several reference frames as a 3-D search space. The search is done in the search space and could reduce the number of search positions efficiently. Experiments results proved the correctness and feasibility of this algorithm for real-world image sequences.