An efficient heuristic-based motion estimation algorithm

The most computation intensive step in video encoding is motion estimation which determines the translational motion (motion vector) of pixel blocks across two or more pictures. Traditional fast techniques for blockmatching motion estimation aim only at reducing the number of locations to check, but not the amount of computation to do at each of these check locations. This paper presents a heuristic-based motion estimation technique which reduces both the number of search locations (via subsampling) as well as the number of operations to perform at each search location (via simplified signature), thus achieving a high speedup factor. Test results show that quality of the motion vectors found by this heuristic-based technique is close to that of full-search motion vectors