An Improved Hierarchical Motion Estimation Algorithm

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the new generation video coding standard which provides equivalent subjective quality with 50 % bit rate reduction compared with the previous video coding standard H. 264/AVC. However, to improve compression efficiency, HEVC introduces new technology and greatly increases the encoding complexity. Therefore, in order to solve the problem of high complexity of HEVC, this paper gives an improved hierarchical motion estimation search algorithm. The algorithm layers the images into four layers and uses different search template to do motion estimation. Experimental results show that the given improved hierarchical motion estimation search algorithm can reduce the encoding time up to 21.73 % on average compared with the TZ-Search algorithm. Therefore, the computational complexity can be reduced.