Fast motion estimation methods for HEVC

Compared with H.264, the High Efficiency Video Coding standard has higher compression efficiency and better transmission performance, and will be used in wider field. TZ search method is adopted to perform integer pixel search in HEVC. Its performance is very perfect but very time-consuming. In this paper, we use hexagon search method in place of TZ search method to speed up motion estimation process. Simulation results show that this scheme accelerates 2-6 times and the performance loss is negligible in sequences with slow movements.