ADAPTIVE FAST MOTION ESTIMATION METHOD FOR H.264 VIDEO ENCODER

摘要

A method for adaptive fast motion estimation of an H.264 video encoder is provided to reduce an amount of computation in a motion estimation process by downscaling a search range and search points in the H.264 video encoder. A motion vector of a horizontal/vertical direction is obtained, and the size of a motion search range given as an encoding condition is obtained from neighboring encoded blocks having high correlation with a block to be encoded. The size of the minimum search region, in which a predicted motion vector of the block to be encoded is able to be searched for, is determined by using the maximum value of the motion vector of the neighboring block(S10). A reference value used to estimate the correlation and the size of the motion vector of the neighboring block is calculated by using the sum of the sizes of the motion vectors of the neighboring vectors. The motion search region is determined by reflecting a local statistics characteristic. The motion search region of the horizontal/vertical direction used to minimize the error of the motion vector estimation is determined. A motion estimation operation is performed by employing a directional variable step search scheme used to independently downscale a search point according to the determined motion search area of the horizontal/vertical direction.