Motion estimation with candidate block and pixel subsampling algorithm

A novel technique of candidate block selection and spatial sub sampling of pixels is presented. Although FSBMA gives an optimal solution and low control overhead, its hardware implementation will not be feasible in terms of power dissipation, speed of processing, compression ratio and real estate. In FSBMA, for a 16×16 block, with a search range of -p to p, totally (2p+1)² number of candidate blocks are to be searched. In this paper, we have constructed an N-queen lattice of candidate blocks, to characterize spatial information in all directions. This arrangement reduces the number of candidate blocks to be searched to 5(2p+1). The total computational complexity is found to be reduced to 7.35% compared to FSBMA. The loss in SNR is very negligible and at the worst case comes to an average of less than 0.23 dB in both low motion and medium motion video sequences.