Interpolation-free fractional pixel motion estimation based on data trend approximation

High computational complexity of a fractional pixel motion estimation (FME) module can in no way be negligible although the module improves visual quality after the integer pixel motion estimation (IME) process. Most of the conventional FME methods must include the interpolation procedure to form fractional pixel search points from the information of the integer pixel matching error costs. The interpolation, however, requires a considerable memory usage and certain amount of processing time. In this paper, therefore, we propose interpolation-free fractional pixel motion estimation techniques by using the data trend approximation and the error cost scaling. The results of our simulation show that the proposed methods produce similar or better performances compared with the existing FME methods, whereas they do not need any additional search points.