ADAPTIVE EARLY JUMP-OUT TECHNIQUE FOR FAST MOTION ESTIMATION IN VIDEOCODING

An adaptive early jump-out technique for speeding up the block-based m otion estimation is proposed. By using the new technique, we can speed up the full range search several times without losing the picture qua lity significantly. The proposed technique can also be embedded in alm ost: all the existing fast motion estimation algorithms to speed up th e computation further. Since the proposed technique can be embedded in the existing motion estimation algorithms, it can be applied to almos t all the standard video codecs, such as the MPEG coder, and improve t he coding speed of such codecs significantly, Our technique has been t ested on the H.261, the H.263, and the MPEG-I codecs, and the coding s peed does improve significantly. (C) 1997 Academic Press.