An Improved Fast Motion Estimation Algorithm Based on UMHexagonS

Motion estimation plays an important role in H.264 video compression process. However, it takes 60%-80% of the encoding time. In this paper, an improved motion estimation algorithm based on UMHexagonS algorithm is proposed, including three aspects which are improvement on unsymmetrical-cross search, improvement on 5×5 square search and improvement on Multi-Hexagon-grid search. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has better performance compared with the original algorithm, which reduces the encoding time without much PSNR degradation and bit-rate increasing.