Image warping using adaptive partial matching

In this paper, we propose an adaptive partial matching method for motion estimation to reduce the computational complexity, while maintaining the image quality comparable to the hexagonal matching method. The proposed motion compensation method combines the fast affine transformation using a vector relationship. We simulate our proposed motion estimation method in a DCT-based coder by encoding CIF (common intermediate format) images at the bitrate of below 64 kb/s. The quality of reconstructed image with our method is substantially improved compared with the block matching algorithms (BMA), and is comparable to the hexagonal matching method. Computational complexity and coding bits are also reduced significantly relative to the BMA and the conventional image warping methods.