A novel parallel implementation of partial distortion search algorithm based on template search

This paper proposes a new early terminating partial distortion search algorithm based on template search in fast motion estimation. Our algorithm accomplishes a parallel implementation technique by considering both the idea of partial distortion search and the advantage of the template search. With this technique, the proposed algorithm achieves a better performance by faster updating the current minimum distortion. The proposed parallel implementation that reduces a large amount of distortion computations between pixels outperforms the standard partial distortion search method by faster rejecting the unlikely candidate blocks. Our algorithm is embedded into the diamond search algorithm, star diamond search algorithm and three-step search algorithm respectively. According to the experiment results, it is proved that about 30% reduction of computational complexity has been obtained compared with the standard partial distortion search. Moreover, there is no degradation of the peak signal-to-noise ratio(PSNR) for motion estimation compared with the embedded block-based template search motion estimation algorithm.