Fast multiple reference frame motion estimation for H.264 based on qualified frame selection scheme

Abstract

Multiple reference frame motion compensation has been adopted by the emerging video coding standard H.264/AVC. But the motion estimation at the encoder over multiple reference frames to find the best inter coding is slow and computationally involved. Thus, a fast algorithm for reference frame selection and motion estimation is proposed to reduce the complexity. The proposed method, Fast Multiple Reference Frame Motion Estimation (FMRFME) selects the suitable reference frames according to the initial motion search results of 8×8 block size, and only the selected frames should be further tested in variable block size motion estimation. The experimental results show that the proposed method reduces a considerable amount of complexity of multiple reference frame motion estimation while keeping the same R-D performance as full search. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.