Novel fractional pixel motion estimation algorithm using motion prediction and fast search pattern

This paper presents a novel fractional motion estimation using motion prediction and fast search pattern for H.264/AVC. Fractional motion estimation improves coding efficiency and image quality. However, it requires additional computational overheads such as interpolation and fractional pixel search. To reduce fractional search computation, we propose a novel fast fractional search algorithm by combining the simplified adaptive search range and the mixed small diamond search pattern with the predicted factional motion vector. Compared with the fractional full search and the prediction-based directional fractional pixel search, the proposed algorithms can reduce up to 93% and 60% of fractional search points, respectively with the maximum PSNR loss less than 0.06 dB. The proposed algorithm is quite suitable for mobile video applications for requiring low computational complexity.