Fast Motion Estimation Based on Content Property for Low-Complexity H.265/HEVC Encoder

The high definition (HD) and ultra HD videos can be widely applied in broadcasting applications. However, with the increased resolution of video, the volume of the raw HD visual information data increases significantly, which becomes a challenge for storage, processing, and transmitting the HD visual data. The state-of-the-art video compression standard-H.265/High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) compresses the raw HD visual data efficiently, while the high compression rate comes at the cost of heavy computation load. Hence, reducing the encoding complexity becomes vital for the H.265/HEVC encoder to be used in broadcasting applications. In this paper, based on the best motion vector selection correlation among the different size prediction modes, we propose a fast motion estimation (ME) method to reduce the encoding complexity of the H.265/HEVC encoder. First, according to the prediction unit (PU) partition type, all PUs are classified into two classes, parent PU and children PUs, respectively. Then, based on the best motion vector selection correlation between the parent PU and children PUs, the block matching search process of the children PUs is adaptively skipped if their parent PU chooses the initial search point as its final optimal motion vector in the ME process. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves an average of 20% ME time saving as compared with the original HM-TZSearch. Meanwhile, the rate distortion performance degradation is negligible.