Adaptive quarter-pel motion estimation and motion vector coding algorithm for the H.264/AVC standard

Abstract

We present an adaptive quarter-pel (Qpel) motion estimation (ME) method for H.264/AVC. Instead of applying Qpel ME to all macroblocks (MBs), the proposed method selectively performs Qpel ME in an MB level. In order to reduce the bit rate, we also propose a motion vector (MV) encoding technique that adaptively selects a different variable length coding (VLC) table according to the accuracy of the MV. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve about 3% average bit rate reduction. (C) 2009 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. [DOI: 10.1117/1.3257262]