Improved Hybrid Block-Based Motion Estimation for Inter-frame Coding

Digital video technology has been increasingly needed in various fields, such as telecommunications, entertainment, medicine. Therefore, video compression is required. Motion estimation methods help in improving video compression efficiency by effectively removing the temporal redundancy between successive frames. Several block-based motion estimation (BME) algorithms are being suggested to reduce the coding process’s computational complexity. This paper proposes a new rapid hybrid (BME) algorithm established on the primary search point prediction and advance ending search point strategies. It combines rough adaptive search and effective local search. The coarse search introduces a new motion vector (MV) prediction technique that utilizes the macro-blocks (MBs) Spatio-temporal correlations to optimize the traditional adaptive-rood-pattern search algorithm (ARPS) and speeding up the whole process without affecting the accuracy. In the accurate local search, the cross-formed search pattern using a one-step search (OSS) block matching algorithm is employed, to estimate the actual (MV) with less computation time and further speed up the search efficiency. Exhaustive experiments are performed to demonstrate the present algorithm’s performance over the benchmark schemes concerning specific assessment criteria for results, including the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), computational complexity and computational gain. The results show that the proposed algorithm is efficient and reliable; it can always give better performance over diamond search (DS) and (ARPS). The conducted test shows an increased performance of search speed while preserving the visual quality of the motion-compensated images, and it achieves 59.76–88.03 speed improvement over (DS) and 20.98–72.06 over (ARPS) for different video sequences. Besides, the suggested method (ARP-OSS) provides the best result compared to (DS) and (ARPS) in terms of time complexity for analyzing all the video samples.