Adaptive Global Elimination Algorithm for Low Power Motion Estimation (J. Low Power Electronics 5: 1-16 (2009))

Motion estimation typically consumes 50% to 70% of total power in video encode application. Optimizing the power consumption of motion estimation process is of great importance to low power video applications. Power dissipation increases with computational complexity. Reduction in motion estimation complexity is usually associated with increase in bit rate and a loss of quality. We explore a set of algorithms that reduce the complexity of motion estimation by adaptively changing the matching complexity based on macro-block features yet have only a modest cost in terms of bit rate increase and quality loss. The adaptive techniques are applied to the global elimination algorithm, which is a well known motion estimation algorithm. The global elimination algorithm uses fixed partition sizes and shapes irrespective of the nature of the macro-block. We show that by adapting the partition sizes and shapes according to the macro-block features such as variance and Hadamard coefficients, the computational complexity of global elimination algorithm can be significantly reduced with only a small increase in bit rate. We also propose a novel center-biased search order that uses early termination method designed to work with the global elimination algorithm. The adaptive match and center-biased search together result in around 57% reduction in computational complexity and 50% reduction in power dissipation compared to the original global elimination algorithm.