A fast full-search motion estimation method for programmable processors with a multiply-accumulator

Motion estimation (ME) has widely been used in video codecs, such as MPEG and ITU-T H.261, to remove interframe redundancy. This paper describes a fast full-search ME method for programmable processors with a multiply-accumulator. It is based on the block matching method that evaluates block mismatch by the mean square error. In order to reduce the computational load of the ME, a fast two-dimensional FIR filtering algorithm is applied, and the redundancy of the overlapped area computation among the reference blocks is eliminated. When the block size is 16/spl times/16 and the number of reference blocks in the search window is 32/spl times/32, this method reduces the computational load to 22.6% without degrading the motion tracking capability.