Hardware-oriented direction-based fast fractional motion estimation algorithm in H.264/AVC

In this paper, a hardware-oriented fast fractional motion estimation (FME) algorithm for H.264/AVC is proposed. For both 1/2-pixel and 1/4-pixel FME, only 4 points are searched, and thus the required processing unit (PU) number is reduced from 9 to 4. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm can provide very similar image quality as full search, and the average PSRN drop is 0.17dB or bitrate increase is 4.08%. Compared with the full search FME hardware architecture [5], the proposed algorithm can effectively reduce about 32.3% hardware cost and thus is very suitable for low-cost and low-power applications.