Based on the analysis of certain existing fast block matching algorithms (BMAs) and study of motion vector distributions of real-world image sequences, a new diamond search (DS) algorithm for fast block matching motion estimation 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 similar performance but requires approximate 20%-25% less computation. Compared with some recently proposed fast BMAs, such as the four-step search (4SS) and the block-based gradient descent search (BBGDS), our DS algorithm also shows its superiority.
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