Improved Fractional Pixel Motion Estimation Algorithm for H.264/AVC

In H.264/AVC fractional pixel motion compensation is adopted in order to achieve more accurate motion description and higher compression efficiency. It, however, remarkably increased computation load in motion estimation (ME) process for video coder. In this paper an improved fractional pixel ME algorithm is proposed to reduce its computation load, which is based on the fact that the distribution of the fractional motion vector (MV) is centered on the best integer pixel. Experiment results show that our proposed algorithm can reduce 75% computation load at most and can also keep rate distortion performance as compared with full fractional ME method used in H.264 video coder