Fast diamond search algorithm for real time video coding

A Fast Diamond Search (FDS) algorithm based on the conventional Diamond Search (DS) algorithm is proposed. Two computationally efficient algorithms are applied to the conventional DS in order to reduce the computations with an acceptable degradation in the coding efficiency. The first algorithm is the Internal Stop Search (ISS) that is used to reduce the internal redundant SAD (Sum of Absolute Difference) operations between both the current and the reference blocks. The second algorithm is the External Stop Search (ESS) that is used to skip the unnecessary operations by skipping all the irrelevant blocks in the search area. Both of these algorithms use adaptive models that accurately remove the unnecessary operations considering small degradation in the coding efficiency. In addition, early search termination and adaptive pattern selections techniques are applied to the proposed FDS as initialization steps to achieve even higher complexity reduction. Experiments show that the proposed FDS algorithm reduces the computations greatly up to 99% and 20% compared to the conventional FS algorithm and DS respectively.