A new error criterion for block based motion estimation

A new error criterion for block based motion estimation in a hybrid video coder is proposed. Traditionally, the mean squared error between the current and the previous frames has been considered as an appropriate criterion for selecting the displacement vectors in hybrid video coders. It is shown that when the spatial domain coder is based on a DCT and dynamic bit allocation, improved performance can be achieved by using the geometric mean of the DCT coefficient variances as the error criterion. The proposed coder offers a significant gain in terms of PSNR, typically in the range of 0.2-1.0 dB, without much increase in the computational complexity.