High performance H.264/AVC encoding motion prediction algorithm

The ITU-T H.264 can be considered currently as the most efficient professional video coding standard. This codec combines distinct complex techniques in order to encapsulate raw video into efficient compressed streams. Unfortunately, the improved H.264 coding efficiency increases significantly the computational complexity, making real-time applications difficult to be achieved. Particularly the motion prediction is an important and complex algorithm used to remove temporal redundancy of image sequences. Considering that, we propose an optimized high performance small diamond topology zonal search motion prediction algorithm. The proposed method has been designed to operate with orthogonal linear vectors, which are specially aligned with 4:1 sub sampled memories organization reducing the number of operations and data manipulations. The proposed solution was implemented in the H.264 JM reference software obtaining results at least two times faster than other available fast algorithms with negligible quality losses.