A sub-pixel motion estimation skipping method for fast HEVC encoding

Abstract

While motion estimation (ME) efficiently compresses video data by reducing temporal redundancy between frames, it does so at the cost of computational complexity. In particular, the complexity of sub-pixel ME (SME) greatly limits fast video encoding because the SME requires a complexity-intensive interpolation process to generate imaginary pixels. Thus, this paper proposes a method that conditionally skips SME, including its interpolation process, by utilizing previously encoded motion information. Results show that the proposed method efficiently reduces both the total encoding time and memory access compared to the previous high efficiency video coding (HEVC) reference model. Keywords: Video compression, Fast motion estimation, HEVC, Interpolation filter, Encoding complexity