Fast block motion estimation for overlapped motion compensation using selective pixel matching

Overlapped block motion compensation (OBMC) has been studied as a partial solution to the blocking artifact problems of the conventional non-overlapped block motion compensation (BMC). OBMC has been shown to provide improved prediction efficiency as well as better subjective quality for coded video compared with BMC. Also, by employing motion estimation techniques optimized for OBMC, called overlapped block motion estimation (OBME), we can obtain further substantial gains in compensation accuracy over conventional nonoverlapped block motion estimation (BME). However, OBME is too complex for practical realization because multiplication is required for each pixel of every candidate block in matching computations. In this work an effective motion estimation method is presented which significantly reduces the computational complexity of OBME. The proposed method uses a predetermined pattern in selecting matched pixels within a window support to reduce the multiplications of OBME. Simulation results show that the proposed method achieves about the same prediction performance as the conventional OBME.