A new fast motion estimation method based on total least squares for video encoding

We present a new fast motion estimation method useful for high speed video encoding. Most of the motion estimation methods for video coding can be classified as block matching (BM) methods or pel recursive (PR) methods. The majority of the current fast motion estimation methods belong to block matching category. These methods try to reduce the number of search locations. Our proposed method is based on the pel recursive formulation. However, in order to achieve fast estimation, we operate on a block of pixels using a total least squares (TLS) based estimation scheme which tries to estimate the true motion vector for each block. The major advantages of the proposed method include very fast estimation, almost constant time for motion estimation for all the video sequences, fractional pel accuracy, and better performance for noisy sequences. We present extensive simulation results to illustrate the performance of the proposed method.