A cost function with position penalty for motion estimation in MPEG-2 video coding

We propose a new cost function for the motion estimation algorithm. A position penalty has been added to the conventional cost function, Sum of Absolute Difference (SAD), to regulate the motion field. The effort is focused on minimization of the size of motion vector difference as well as residual error which need to be coded. Compared to the existing motion field regulation methods, the proposed method has a better chance to choose minimum distortion which allows it to have better picture quality with a fixed bit rate. Simulation results show that the proposed cost function outperforms the existing methods with minimal increase of computational cost, which makes it attractive for hardware implementation.