Temporal search range prediction based on a linear model of motion-compensated residue

An efficient temporal search range prediction method is proposed to reduce the complexity of multiple reference frames motion estimation (MRFME) in video coding. Based on a linear model of motion-compensated residue, the behavior of residues under MRFME is investigated, and the gain of multiple reference frames is analyzed. The proposed method utilizes the current residue to estimate the gain of searching more reference frames, and predicts the temporal search range that maintains the coding performance with minimum complexity. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the complexity in motion estimation while the degradation of the coding performance is negligible.