An Efficient Block-Matching Motion Estimation Algorithm for H.264 Video Coding Standard

Block matching motion estimation (BMME) plays a very important role in video coding. The performance of BMME greatly affects the quality of the encoded bitstream. Full search (FS) is the optimal algorithm for BMME. But the tremendous computation payload of it is unaffordable for practical applications, especially for real-time applications. To overcome this problem, this paper presents an efficient motion estimation algorithm suitable for H.264/AVC encoding systems. The high computational demands of the H.264 video encoder are reduced by a deformable block matching algorithm using the node-based model. Experiments show that the efficient motion estimation algorithm presented can further reduce block matching distortion computations relative to conventional fast motion estimation algorithms with neglectable coding efficiency loss