Model-based quarter-pixel motion estimation with low computational complexity

Proposed is an interpolation-free quarter-pixel motion estimation method based on a mathematical model for video encoding. In this method, only three shift operators and four compare operators are required in each horizontal and vertical direction to find a quarter-pixel resolution motion vector. Experimental results show that the proposed method reaches almost the same performance as an interpolation-based full-search for quarter-pixel motion estimation with much less computational complexity.