Fast H.264/AVC motion estimation algorithm using adaptive search range

With the advent of new video standards such as H.264/AVC, the demands for low-complexity advanced video coding (AVC), particularly for the subfunction of variable block searching motion estimation, is increasingly important for efficient system designs. The motion estimation needs heavy computations and many external memory accesses which are the main sources of the system complexity and power consumption. We propose a fast motion estimation scheme. The motion estimation algorithm is based on the full search block matching (FSBM) motion estimation by applying the adaptive search range. The search range is adaptively adjusted based on the heuristic model developed through exhaustive experiments of motion vector characteristics of real-life image sequences. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is up to 90% faster while satisfying similar quality as FSBM.