Efficient motion estimation using spatial and temporal motion vector prediction

This paper presents a motion estimation technique for the coding of moving video sequences that is based on spatial and temporal prediction. The motion vector of a moving object is tracked using spatial and temporal prediction and used as a starting point for the motion estimation search algorithm. The predicted motion vector is selected from several candidate motion vectors according to the block matching criterion. Experimental results show that spatio-temporal prediction reduces the number of computations performed by the motion search algorithm by 30% for MPEG-2 encoding and by 40% for H.263 encoding