Hybrid hierarchical search motion estimation for Video Compression

There has been an increasing demand for digital video technology in various fields of telecommunication, entertainment, medicine etc. and hence the need for Video Compression. Motion estimation techniques help in better Video Compression performance by removing the temporal redundancy effectively between frames. Block based motion estimation has been widely used for video coding. One such method is the Hierarchical Search Technique for BMA. In this work, a hierarchical search approach making use of three different algorithms Full Search Algorithm, New Cross Diamond Search Algorithm and a New Three Step Search Algorithm are used. The original image is sub-sampled into additional two levels. The Full Search is performed on the highest level where the complexity is relatively low. The New Cross Diamond search algorithm and a New Three-Step Search Algorithm are used in the consecutive two levels. The results of the algorithm show better performance in terms of PSNR with reduced complexity.