Hardware-oriented low complexity motion estimation for HEVC

In this paper, we proposed an adaptive search range selection algorithm which is based on motion vector variance to reduce computational complexity of the motion estimation with full search. The proposal is designed to suit for hardware implementation. In previous work, the method which determines the search range using motion vector variance was proposed. However, the selected search range is not efficient enough. The proposed algorithm can efficiently reduce the redundant search range using the distribution of the surrounding motion vectors. In addition, the proposed method performs the hierarchical motion estimation when the search range is still too wide. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieved averagely 80.9% complexity reduction with 0.9% BD-rate increasing, compared with the previous work.