Sub-block combination fractional motion estimation algorithms for H.264/AVC

This paper proposes a Sub-block Combination Fractional Motion Estimation (SCFME) algorithm for the H.264/AVC video encoder. Fractional Motion Estimation (FME) performs interpolation for the overlapped pixels which increases the computational complexity. The proposed sub-block combination algorithm can reduce the computational complexity by eliminating the overlapped pixel interpolation. Compared with the fast full search, the proposed algorithm can reduce up to 69.75% of the number of pixels for fractional search. In addition, the decrease of PSNR is less than 0.067dB in average. Therefore, the proposed SCFME algorithm is quite suitable for mobile applications requiring low power and complexity.