A Computation-Aware Scheme for Motion Estimation in MPEG-4

In this study, a computation-aware scheme for motion estimation (ME) in MPEG-4 is proposed. The objective of the proposed scheme is to properly distribute the available ME computations of the MPEG-4 encoder. Here, the temporal motion vector prediction technique is used to get the predicted motion vector (PMV) of each macroblock (MB). The sum of absolute components of the PMVs of all the MBs in a video frame is used as the measure to allocate the target computation to a video frame. The proposed scheme contains three phases: 1 ) frame-level computation allocation, 2) MB-level computation allocation, and 3) mode-level computation allocation. As compared with the comparison scheme, the proposed computation-aware scheme for motion estimation in MPEG-4 usually has the better performance (average PSNR and bit rate degradations) in most simulation cases