A fast BMA based on combining search candidate subsampling and APDS

A new faster block-matching algorithm (BMA) named SSC-APDS is presented by subsampling search candidates in adjustable partial distortion search (APDS). Firstly APDS is modified to visit about half points of all search candidates by taking subsampling on them, using a spiral-scanning path with one skip. Two selected candidates that have minimal and second minimal block distortion measures are obtained Then a fine-tune step is taken around them to find the best one, while at most 8 more candidates were required. Experimental results show that the SSC-APDS can maintain its MSE performance very close to that of the APDS with higher speedup ratio. Moreover, the wider the search window is, the better SSC-APDS performs