H.264 motion estimation algorithm based on video sequences activity

Motion estimation is an important part of H.264/AVC encoding progress, with high computational complexity. Therefore, it is quite necessary to find a fast motion estimation algorithm for real-time applications. The algorithm proposed in this letter adjudges the macroblocks activity degree first; then classifies different video sequences, and applies different search strategies according to the result. Experiments show that this method obtains almost the same video quality with the Full Search (FS) algorithm but with reduced more than 95% computation cost.