An improved multilevel successive elimination algorithm for fast full-search motion estimation

It is well known that a lot of computations are required for motion estimation in video encoding. Recently, the multilevel successive elimination algorithm (MSEA) has been proposed to reduce the computational complexity of block matching for motion estimation without degradation of estimation accuracy. In the MSEA, the block matching is hierarchically carried out and the invalid candidate block is successively eliminated. In this paper, we propose an improved MSEA based on a new efficient decision condition. The number of the calculations to eliminate the invalid block can be reduced by the new efficient decision condition in the proposed algorithm. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves about 30~40% computational saving as compared with the MSEA.