A fast motion-compensation scheme for video coding using feature vector matching

This paper presents a fast block feature motion estimation scheme and a mixed-mode multiresolution motion estimation system configuration. In this proposed motion estimation scheme, the sign truncated feature (STF) is defined and used for block matching, as opposed to the pixel intensity values used in the conventional block matching methods. Using the STF definition, a data block can be presented by a mean and a set of binary features with a much reduced data set. The block matching motion estimation is then divided to mean matching and binary phase matching. The proposed technique enables a significant reduction in computational complexity compared with the conventional full-search block matching ME because binary phase matching only involves Boolean logic operations. This scheme also significantly reduces the data transfer time between the frame buffer and motion estimator. Our test results indicate that the performance of the proposed scheme is comparable with the full-search block matching under the same search ranges, however, the proposed scheme can be implemented about 64 times faster than the conventional full-search scheme.