Improvements on fast motion estimation strategy for H.264/AVC

This paper analyzes the statistical characters of rate-distortion performances of the fast motion estimation (ME) algorithms in H.264/AVC and introduces an additional early termination scheme with adaptive thresholds for UMHS and CBFPS. This keeps the R-D performance of the original UMHS and CBFPS, while reducing the computational complexity of encoding process considerably. Simulation results in different conditions (image sizes from QCIF to HD and various quantization parameters) are shown. The proposed method is suitable on other video coding platforms and could be integrated with ease. Partial methods in this paper have been adopted into the JM software and the JVT test model.