A Content-Motion-Aware Motion Estimation for Quality-Stationary Video Coding
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Research Article A Content-Motion-Aware Motion Estimation for Quality-Stationary Video Coding Meng-Chun Lin and Lan-Rong Dung Department of Electrical and Control Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu 30010, Taiwan Correspondence should be addressed to Meng-Chun Lin, [email protected] Received 31 March 2010; Revised 3 July 2010; Accepted 1 August 2010 Academic Editor: Mark Liao Copyright © 2010 M.-C. Lin and L.-R. Dung. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The block-matching motion estimation has been aggressively developed for years. Many papers have presented fast block-matching algorithms (FBMAs) for the reduction of computation complexity. Nevertheless, their results, in terms of video quality and bitrate, are rather content-varying. Very few FBMAs can result in stationary or quasistationary video quality for different motion types of video content. Instead of using multiple search algorithms, this paper proposes a quality-stationary motion estimation with a unified search mechanism. This paper presents a content-motion-aware motion estimation for quality-stationary video coding. Under the rate control mechanism, the proposed motion estimation, based on subsample approach, adaptively adjusts the subsample ratio with the motion-level of video sequence to keep the degradation of video quality low. The proposed approach is a companion for all kinds of FBMAs in H.264/AVC. As shown in experimental results, the proposed approach can produce stationary quality. Comparing with the full-search block-matching algorithm, the quality degradation is less than 0.36 dB while the average saving of power consumption is 69.6%. When applying the proposed approach for the fast motion estimation (FME) algorithm in H.264/AVC JM reference software, the proposed approach can save 62.2% of the power consumption while the quality degradation is less than 0.27 dB.
1. Introduction Motion Estimation (ME) has been proven to be effective to exploit the temporal redundancy of video sequences and, therefore, becomes a key component of multimedia standards, such as MPEG standards and H.26X [1–7]. The most popular algorithm for the VLSI implementation of motion estimation is the block-based full search algorithm [8–11]. The block-based full search algorithm has high degree of modularity and requires low control overhead. However, the full search algorithm notoriously needs high computation load and large memory size [12–14]. The highly computational cost has become a major problem on the implementation of motion estimation. To reduce the computational complexity of the fullsearch block-matching (FSBM) algorithm, researchers have proposed various fast algorithms. They either reduce search steps [12, 15–22] or simplify calculations of error criterion [8, 23–25]. Some researchers combined both step-reduction
and criterion-simplifying to significantly
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