A novel adaptive pixel decimation for block motion vector estimation

This paper presents a novel approach to pixel decimation for motion estimat ion in video coding. Early techniques of pixel decimation use regular pixel patterns to evaluate matching criterion. Recent techniques use adaptive pi xel patterns and have achieved better efficiency. However, these adaptive t echniques require an initial division of a block into a set of uniform regi ons and therefore are only locally-adaptive in essence. In this paper, we p resent a globally-adaptive scheme for pixel decimation, in which no regions are fixed at the beginning and pixels are selected only ii they have featu res important to the determination of a match. The experiment results show that when no more than 40 pixels are selected out of a 16x16 block, this ap proach achieves a better search accuracy by 13-22% than the previous locall y-adaptive methods which also use features.