An enhanced two-pass motion estimation algorithm with reduced search for fast video compression

Motion estimation is the vital step in video compression and several algorithms have been proposed for its acceleration. In this paper we present an innovative two pass motion estimation technique with reduced search to minimize the computational load. We adopt the block based motion estimator, which first finds the matching block using the trace calculation and only on match, it calculates the mean absolute difference (MAD) to ensure best motion prediction. In addition, since the motion vectors themselves are temporal, we reduce the search range by approximating the next motion vector from the previous predictions. This method remarkably reduces the computational load and provides better results comparable with more expensive full search MAD techniques.