A new motion compensation algorithm in DCT domain for H.261 video encoder

This paper proposes a method to improve the H.261 video encoder by using a new motion estimation (ME) algorithm instead of the full search block matching motion estimation algorithm (BMA). We thought that the traditional BMA based on the least square error or absolute error criterion may not be suitable for the H.261 video encoder. A good matching criterion should consider not only the interframe prediction error energy, but also the total bit number for encoding the motion vectors and interframe prediction error. Motivated by the above idea, we introduced a new motion estimation algorithm, which performs motion estimation in the DCT domain, and use a new matching criterion-the minimum bit rate criterion. Experimental results show that the performance of the H.261 encoder is improved greatly.