High Efficiency and Low Complexity Motion Estimation Algorithm for MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 Coding

H.264/AVC has achieved significant rate-distortion efficiency by many useful video encoding and decoding tools, but the motion estimation process concerns greatly on computational complexity. In this work, we propose an efficient algorithm, Hierarchical Single Cross Search (HSCS), by using the precision initial search center and simple search strategy to finish the motion estimation. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method can obtain good performance. Through the proposed features, the coding performance can be improved significantly, and the computation complexity of the integer pixel motion estimation of H.264 is also decreased tremendously