A Fast Full Algorithm for Minimizing the Maximum Difference (MinMax) in Motion Estimation

Abstract

In this paper, a fast full search (FS) algorithm is proposed to accelerate the block matching procedure of motion estimation. Based on the monotonic relation between the Supreme of absolute differences (SAD) obtained for distinct layers of a pyramid structure called Sup-pyramid, the proposed method successfully rejects many impossible candidates considered in the FS. The derivation of the monotonicity relation uses the l∞ version of Minkowski’s Inequality, an inequality which is quite well-known in the field of Math. Simulation results show that the computational complexity is much better than that of the FS. The processing speed of the proposed method is also compared with that of the Three-Step Search (TSS), which is often used for block matching in interframe video coding, although the visual quality performance of TSS is usually poorer than that of the FS.