A Dynamic Pattern Search for Real Time Block Matching Motion Estimation

It has been a challenge for block matching motion estimation algorithms to reduce search time computation while keeping degradation as low as possible. Faster diamond search and hexagonal search patterns have been introduced to reduce search time complexity. However, in these techniques, search pattern size is fixed which may cause oversearch or undersearch depending on the magnitude of motion. In this paper, a new dynamic pattern based search technique is proposed whose size is variable for each macroblock (MB) depending on the motion information of its spatially as well as temporally adjacent blocks. Experimental analysis shows an average speed up of nearly 39% and 104% with respect to hexagonal search (HS) and diamond search (DS) respectively, keeping almost same quality in terms of average PSNR (dB).