Fast Motion Estimation Based on Diamond Refinement Search for High Efficiency Video Coding

High-efficiency video coding (HEVC) is the latest video coding standard, and it has become more and more important due to its excellent coding performance. However, compared with the previous H.264 / AVC, the performance is significantly improved at the cost of higher coding complexity. The motion estimation (ME) is the most time-consuming part of removing the time redundancy effectively. In the reference software of HEVC, the search method of testing is adopted, and (TZ-Search) is used as the default fast ME method, but its computational complexity is still too high for real-time applications. In this paper proposes a fast motion estimation algorithm based on diamond refinement search and mode decision for efficient video coding standard. It will accelerate the calculation of SAD time for each modification of the search method. Then use the PU Mode usage rate to select the most commonly used PU Mode to reduce the PU Mode Decision option and increase the overall calculation time. In addition, the reduction of Inter Prediction Min Block Size has also been proposed to compensate for the reduction of PSNR loss after PU Mode Decision, thereby maintaining a certain image quality while saving overall computing time. Compared with TZ-Search, the total encoder complexity is reduced by 46.15% and the rate distortion degradation is negligible in the low-delay P configuration; therefore, the complexity is reduced and the savings are achieved.