Performance improvement in motion estimation of Dirac wavelet based video codec

This paper presents an efficient motion estimation algorithm for enhancing the performance of Dirac wavelet based video encoder. The proposed scheme is based on a 3D recursive search algorithm that uses the previously calculated motion vectors from the neighboring blocks to calculate the motion vector for the current block. The computational complexity is reduced drastically with an improvement in the encoding time. The results show that the proposed algorithm gives approximately 40% to 60% reduction in terms of number of SAD calculations compared with the reference codec implementation. The average PSNR performance and compression efficiency remains close to reference codec implementation. Results based on a number of video sequences are presented to demonstrate clearly the benefits of the proposed improvements in Dirac's motion estimation module.