Review on the latest H.264 motion estimation techniques

Motion estimation is the most time consuming part in the H.264 video coding standard. However, this part is vital where it determines the quality and speed of an encoding process. The UMHexagonS algorithm has been adopted for H.264 fast search algorithm to overcome the problem on encoding speed. In thorough study on the UMHexagonS algorithm, there are numerous methods to improve the UMHexagonS speed whilst maintaining the quality of the encoding process. This paper reviews several techniques that can be implemented in each step in the UMHexagonS algorithm. The results show that the UMHexagonS performance can be improved further by 1.06% to 17.31% whilst maintaining good image quality.