EURASIP Journal on Image and Video Processing 
Volume 2008 (2008), Article ID 524793, 8 pages
doi:10.1155/2008/524793
Research Article

Improved Motion Estimation Using Early Zero-Block Detection

Y. M. Lee, Y. J. Tsai, and Y. Lin

 Department of Communication Engineering, National Central University, Chungli 32054, Taiwan
Received 23 December 2007; Revised 13 May 2008; Accepted 24 June 2008

Recommended by Jian Zhang

Abstract

We incorporate the early zero-block detection technique into the UMHexagonS algorithm, which has already been adopted in H.264/AVC JM reference software, to speed up the motion estimation process. A nearly sufficient condition is derived for early zero-block detection. Although the conventional early zero-block detection method can achieve significant improvement in computation reduction, the PSNR loss, to whatever extent, is not negligible especially for high quantization parameter (QP) or low bit-rate coding. This paper modifies the UMHexagonS algorithm with the early zero-block detection technique to improve its coding performance. The experimental results reveal that the improved UMHexagonS algorithm greatly reduces computation while maintaining very high coding efficiency.