Non-overlapping Search Pattern for Logarithmic Search Motion Estimation

Logarithmic search motion estimation is popular in video codecs because of its low complexity, and because it finds the motion vector in a pre-defined number of computation steps. Motion estimation still remains the most demanding part of the encoding scheme, so further improvements in terms of reduced computational complexity are desirable. Motion estimation is also rewarding, in terms of bit-rate reduction, so the quality of the resulting motion vector field has high influence on video coding performance. In this paper we will show how the computational complexity can be lowered and the quality of the motion vector field improved by a simple change of the search pattern.