A Novel Motion Estimation Method Based on Structural Similarity for H.264 Inter Prediction

In the motion estimation of H.264, the best matching blocks and the best prediction modes are chosen by Lagrange cost function whose distortion metric is the sum of absolute (transformed) differences [SA(T)D] which has similar meaning with MSE or PSNR. Recently a new image measurement called structural similarity (SSIM) based on the degradation of structural information was brought forward. It is proved that the SSIM can provide a better approximation for the perceived image distortion than the currently used PSNR (or MSE). In this paper, we propose an improved motion estimation method based on SSIM (MEBSS) for H.264 inter coding. Experiment results show that the MEBSS can reduce average 20% bit rate and 2% encoding time while maintaining the same perceptual video quality, and the maximum reduction in bitrate is more than 50%