Motion search method based on zero-block detection in H.264/AVC

In order to reduce the computation in the H.264 encoder, a method for the motion search based on the zero-block detection is proposed in this paper. According to the characteristics of the transform and motion search in H.264, the zero-block detection is performed in the process of the motion search for the interframe encoding by comparing the sum of the absolute differences (SAD) to a value related with the quantization parameter (QP). The process of the motion search stops when a zero-block is detected, and the transform and quantization of this zero-block are skipped, which leads to save a lot of time for the H.264 encoder. Simulation results showed that in contrast with the JM7.4 video encoder, the proposed method reduces the computations and code length without loss of the encoding picture quality, and it is very efficient in real time low bit rate video encoding.