Performance Enhancement of Sum of Absolute Difference (SAD) Computation in H.264/AVC Using Saturation Arithmetic

Sum of Absolute Difference (SAD) Computation is commonly used for motion estimation in video coding. It is usually the computationally intensive part in video processing. Therefore, a method to reduce the computational complexity is strictly required. In this paper, the effectiveness of saturation arithmetic on SAD computation is presented. Our goal is to use saturation arithmetic to reduce the complexity of SAD computation for the encoding process while the accuracy in finding the best matching block from the reference frame is still maintained. Experiment results show that the computational complexity of SAD computation is reduced efficiently by saving a number of bits for SAD values representation while the video quality is kept.