A New Spatio-Temporal Predictor for Motion Estimation in H.264 Video Coding

The new JVT H.264 video coding standard is becoming the dominant standard, mainly due to its high coding efficiency. Among all modules in the encoder, motion estimation plays a key role since it can significantly affect the output quality of an encoded sequence. However, motion estimation requires a significant part of the encoding time. Thus, various fast motion estimation algorithms have been proposed. The H.264 reference encoder has currently adopted three fast motion estimation algorithms. These algorithms aim at reducing the search area by predicting the search points using suitable predictors. In this paper we propose a new spatio-temporal predictor and we study the effectiveness of different predictors in order to find out whether these predictors truly contribute to the decrease of motion estimation time without affecting video quality and adding undesirable complexity to the encoder.