A Fast Block Matching Algorithm in Feature Domain

Motion estimation is a computation-intensive procedure used in many coding schemes such as MPEG and H.261 to remove temporal redundancy in image sequences. In this paper, we describe an algorithm which can reduce computation significantly and achieve close-to-optimal performance in mean absolute difference(MAD) sense. In contrast with the conventional exhaustive search in pixel domain, we search in a feature domain to be followed by "reexamination" in pixel domain. Using our algorithm, the computation for each NxN block can be reduced by a factor of N/2 compared with the conventional exhaustive search.