Adaptive algorithm for fast motion estimation in H.264/MPEG-4 AVC

With reference to the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video coding standard featuring interframe prediction with multiple reference frames and block sizes, this paper presents a motion estimator (ME) which exploits input signal variations to dynamically reconfigure the search size and the number of reference frames of an exhaustive block-matching search. This ME achieves, for bit-rates ranging from few Kbps to several Mbps, the same performance of the Full-Search with a considerable complexity reduction.