Fast motion estimation based on enhanced constrained one-bit transform

An enhanced constrained one-bit transform (C1BT)-based fast motion estimation (ME) method is proposed. Binary transform-based ME identifies the proper motion vector by transforming the 8-bit pixels in the original image into a low bit depth of the bit plane, substantially reducing the computational complexity and facilitating hardware implementation by using the number of non-matching points (NNMPs) instead of the sum of absolute difference (SAD). However, a motion block size is N × N, therefore the dynamic range of NNMP (0 ≤ NNMP ≤ N × N) is decreased to 1/256 compared to that of the SAD with 8-bit images (0 ≤ SAD ≤ 256 × N × N). The higher the NNMP between the current bit plane and the previous bit plane, the more probable that it will be the block most similar to each other. Therefore, the matching error criterion of NNMP is extended to improve ME performance. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm improves the performance of ME accuracy by 0.27, 0.38 and 0.67 dB compared to the C1BT-based ME, two-bit transform (2BT)-based ME and 1BT-based ME, respectively.