Generalised block-matching motion estimation using quad-tree structured spatial decomposition

A generalised block-matching motion estimation with variable-size blocks is proposed. The location and size of each block are determined from a quad-tree spatial decomposition algorithm. Experimental results with head-and-shoulders test image sequences show that motion-compensated errors with this method have lower entropy than the conventional fixed or variable-size block-matching techniques. The quality of the coded pictures under the proposed method with an H.261 codec, both subjectively and in terms of PSNR, outperforms the conventional use of fixed and variable block-size motion estimators