Enhanced Strict Multilevel Successive Elimination Algorithm for Fast Motion Estimation

This paper presents an enhanced strict multilevel successive elimination algorithm (EMSEA) for fast block-matching motion estimation, which is based on the previous strict multilevel successive elimination algorithm (SMSEA) (Song et al., 2006). Different to the SMSEA algorithm with fixed parameters, in EMSEA algorithm, the whole search area is divided into two regions and each region has its own parameters. Therefore, the computation complexity of SMSEA algorithm can be further decreased. Experiments show that the proposed EMSEA algorithm can reduce 16.2% of the SMSEA computation and maintain almost the same image quality, which is better than the TSS and DS algorithms.