A fast and effective method for motion estimation

Today, the market for multimedia devices (such as DV camcoders, digital still cameras and videophones) is growing dramatically. Most of these multimedia video data have to be compressed for storage or transmission by international standards such as MPEG and H.26x series. In these standards, motion estimation is the most time consuming step. This study proposes a new approach to reduce the search time of motion estimation in modern video compression. The proposed method applies the spider-web pattern inside the search area to get the performance gain. The simulation results show that our algorithm has better efficiency than previous works and has minimal impact on PSNR.