Modified Three Diamonds Motion Search for Video Coding

the fundamental principle of Video Coding Standards is reducing the spatial and temporal redundancies from the consecutive frames through what is called motion Estimation. Efficient video coding standards have very sophisticated motion Estimation algorithms. However, those schemes are complicated and consume the majority of the encoding time. In this paper a new matching algorithm for fast block motion estimation is proposed which is a Modified Three Diamonds Search Algorithm using the Four Step-Search and the Half-Pel Diamond Search. It reduces the motion estimation time without affecting the video quality compared to the existing algorithms. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed scheme.