ATETS:adaptive early termination search algorithm for H.264

An adaptive early termination search algorithm was proposed to reduce the computational amount of motion compensation in H.264 video coding brought about by the variable block-size motion estimation.According to the characteristics of integer discrete cosine transformation(DCT) and quantization,the coefficient-all-zero block was determined in advance to terminate meaningless search.According to the high correlation between motion vector and predicted motion vector,the predicted block was chosen as early termination block.An adaptive threshold based on quantization step was presented to optimize the performance. Experiments showed that when this algorithm is used with the UMHexagonS fast search algorithm,it can reduce about 60% of search points and keep the quality and compression rate of picture unchanged.This algorithm provides robust performance for quantization step,and it is applicable to the fixed bit-rate real-time system.