A new diamond search algorithm for fast block-matching motion estimation

Based on the study of motion vector distribution from several commonly used test image sequences, a new diamond search (DS) algorithm for fast block-matching motion estimation (BMME) is proposed in this paper. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed DS algorithm greatly outperforms the well-known three-step search (TSS) algorithm. Compared with the new three-step search (NTSS) algorithm, the DS algorithm achieves close performance but requires less computation by up to 22% on average. Experimental results also show that the DS algorithm is better than the four-step search (4SS) and block-based gradient descent search (BBGDS), in terms of mean-square error performance and required number of search points.