A new diamond search algorithm for fast block matching motion estimation

Abstract

Based on the analysis of certain existing fast block matching algorithms (BMAs) and study of motion vector distributions of real-world image sequences, a new diamond search (DS) algorithm for fast block matching motion estimation is proposed in this paper. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed DS algorithm greatly outperforms the well-known three-step search (TSS) algorithm. Compared with the new three-step search (NTSS) algorithm, the DS algorithm achieves similar performance but requires approximate 20%-25% less computation. Compared with some recently proposed fast BMAs, such as the four-step search (4SS) and the block-based gradient descent search (BBGDS), our DS algorithm also shows its superiority.