Adaptive early jump-out technique for fast motion estimation in video coding

An adaptive early jump-out technique for speeding up the block-based motion estimation is proposed. By using the new technique, we can speed up the full range search several times without losing the picture quality significantly. The proposed technique can also be embedded into almost all the existing fast motion estimation algorithms to speed up the computation further. Since the proposed technique can be embedded into the existing motion estimation algorithms, it can be applied to almost all the standard video codecs, such as the MPEG coder, and improve the coding speed of such codecs significantly. Our technique has been tested on the H.261 and the MPEG-I codecs, and the coding speed improves significantly.