A new error criterion for block based motion estimation

In this paper, a new error criterion for block based motion estimation in a hybrid video coder is proposed. Traditionally, the mean squared error between the current and the previous frames has been considered as an appropriate criterion for selecting the displacement vectors in hybrid video coders. In this work, it is shown that when the spatial domain coder is based on a DCT and dynamic bit allocation, improved performance can be achieved by using the geometric mean of the DCT coeecient variances as error criterion. The proposed coder ooers a signiicant gain in terms of PSNR, typically in the range of 0:2?1:0 dB, without much increase in the computational complexity.