A New Spatio-Temporal Fast Motion Estimation Algorithm

A new spatio-temporal approach is proposed for fast block motion estimation in video coding. The approach exploits the existing correlation of the spatio- temporal block neighborhood by utilizing the frequency of appearance of the neighborhood´s motion vectors. Extensive simulations show that the proposed algorithm performs close to the full search algorithm (in terms of quality) with a significant computational gain. Under fine tuning of specific parameters, the algorithm becomes comparable to other fast search algorithms.