Motion estimation using partial cost function calculation

Having fast and efficient motion estimation is crucial in today's advance video compression technique. In this paper, a method which we call partial cost function calculation is proposed for faster cost calculation in finding the exact match for any type of block matching algorithms. It is based upon the reduced number of operations which follows a certain pattern, instead of calculating the cost for all points within a block. The experimental results show that the proposed method gives two to eight times reduction (depending upon the block size used) in the computational load with the motion estimation accuracy loss which is negligible compared with full cost function calculation and can be used in conjunction with any type of fast block matching algorithms.