A novel predict hexagon search algorithm for fast block motion estimation on H.264 video coding

The upcoming video coding standard, MPEG-4 AVC/JVT/H.264, motion estimation is allowed to use multiple references and multiple block sizes to improve the rate-distortion performance. However, full exhaustive search of all block sizes is computational intensive with complexity increasing linearly to the number of allowed reference frame and block size. A novel search algorithm, predict hexagon search (PHS), is proposed. The PHS pattern is applied by the comparison with the hexagon based search pattern. It can predict the hexagon search pattern in horizontal or vertical direction. Analysis shows that the speed improvement of the PHS over the diamond search (DS) and the hexagon based search (HEXBS) is about 58% and 53% respectively.