Adaptive Diamond Search Algorithm for Motion Estimation

Abstract

Implementation of the Block Matching Algorithm (BMA) in Motion Estimation (ME) has been widely used in video encoder due to its simplicity and high compression efficiency. Many fast search methods of BMAs are being introduced to increase the efficiency  of the ME  process. This paper proposed a new algorithm, namely Adaptive Diamond Search Algorithm (ADS) which employs three different search patterns for its two main stages. At the initial step, an additional step is added to a predetermined static block to further speed up the search process as it is beneficial to small motion video sequence contents. The performances of the ADS are then compared with three selected established algorithms, namely the Full Search (FS), Diamond Search (DS) and Hexagon-Diamond Search (HDS). Based on the simulation result, the proposed algorithm yields a very good video quality performance with fewer search points compared with other algorithms.