Hardware friendly background analysis based complexity reduction in H.264/AVC multiple reference frames motion estimation

In H.264 standard, multiple reference frame motion estimation (MRF- ME) can help to generate small residues and improve the performance. However, MRF-ME is also a computation intensive task for video coding system. Many software oriented fast algorithms have been proposed to shorten MRF-ME process. For hardwired real-time encoder, the division of ME part into two pipeline stages degrades the efficiency of many fast algorithms. This paper gives one hardware friendly MRF-ME algorithm to reduce computation complexity in MRF-ME procedure. The proposed algorithm is based on the analysis of macroblock´s (MB´s) feature and restricts search range for static background MB. Through experiment results, with negligible video quality degradation, the proposed background analysis based MRF-ME algorithm can averagely reduce 41.75% ME time for sequences with static background. Moreover, the proposed algorithm is compatible to other fast algorithms and friendly to hardware implementation of H.264 real-time encoder.