Performance Comparison of Motion Estimation Algorithms on Digital Video Images

This paper presents a comparative study on technique to achieve high compression ratio in video coding. The focus is on the Block Matching Motion Estimation (BMME) techniques. It has been particularly used in various coding standards. In the BMME, search patterns and the center-biased characteristics of motion vector (MV) have large impact on the search speed and quality of video. Three fast Block Matching Algorithms (BMAs) of motion estimation through block matching have been implemented and performance of these three has been tested using MATLAB software. The Cross Diamond Search (CDS) is compared with Full Search (FS) and Cross Search (CS) algorithms based on search points (search speed) and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) as the quality of the video. The CDS algorithm was designed to fit the cross-center-biased (CCB) MV distribution characteristics of the real-world video sequences. CDS compares favorably with the other algorithms for low motion sequences in terms of speed, quality and computational complexity.