Hardware-oriented region based algorithm for low power motion estimation

Motion estimation is a fundamental step for high quality, low bandwidth video compression. Recently, the MPEG-4 group has proposed some low complexity algorithms. They have the same performance in term of PSNR as the full search algorithm, but at the same time the complexity is dramatically reduced. However it is difficult to realize these algorithms with conventional hardware structures. Here we present another algorithm with similar performance, but that is realizable with a simpler hardware structure.