A simple and efficient algorithm for block matching motion estimation in video coding

Computational complexity and accuracy of motion vector are two key factors of block matching motion estimation in video coding. This paper proposes a simple and efficient algorithm named edge pixels classification (EPC) algorithm. According to the fact that human eyes are highly sensitive to the motion of the edge, the EPC algorithm makes full use of the pixels in the edge. After edge detection, the pixels in the edge are classified into two categories: matching pixels and mismatching pixels. The best matching block within a search area is the one with the highest number of matching pixels. Compared with some well-known algorithms which use mean absolute difference (MAD) matching criteria, the EPC algorithm can provide much higher performance with much lower computational complexity