An efficient parallel motion estimation algorithm for digital image processing

The authors present an efficient block-matching algorithm called the parallel hierarchical one-dimensional search (PHODS) for motion estimation. Instead of finding the two-dimensional motion vector directly, the PHODS finds two one-dimensional displacements in parallel on the two axes (say x and y) independently within the search area. The major feature of this algorithm is that its search speed for the motion vector is faster than that of the other search algorithms on account of its simpler computations and parallelism. Compared with previous research in terms of four measurements, the PHODS can rival those algorithms for performance. The hardware-oriented features of the PHODS, i.e., regularity, simplicity, and parallelism, guarantee that the PHODS is more suitable for hardware realization of a VLSI motion estimator