Fully adaptive performance scalable block-based motion estimation

Trading-off computational complexity and quality is an important performance constraint for real time application of motion estimation algorithm. To address this issue, an adaptive-centre diamond search distance dependent thresholding search (ADSDTS) algorithm has been proposed for motion estimation in video coding applications. ADSDTS encompassed both the full search (FS) as well as fast searching modes, with different threshold settings providing various quality-of-service levels. The main drawback of ADSDTS was that the threshold value was manually defined. In this paper, the ADSDTS algorithm has been extended to a fully adaptive centre-prediction diamond-search distance-dependent thresholding search (FACDDTS), a key feature of which is the automatic adaptation of the threshold using the desired target and the content from the actual video sequence, to achieve a guaranteed level of quality or processing complexity. Experimental results confirm the performance of the FACDDTS algorithm in achieving this objective with minimal additional computational cost.