Patent ID: 7215384

Claim:
A method for performing motion estimation comprising: receiving a stream of data comprising at least a predicted frame and a temporally closest anchor frame; if the temporally closest anchor frame is previous to the predicted frame, utilizing even-parity field prediction to only unidirectionally forward predict content of each of a plurality of fields of the unidirectionally forward predicted frame from corresponding fields of only the temporally closest anchor frame; and if the temporally closest anchor frame is subsequent to the predicted frame, utilizing even-parity field prediction to only unidirectionally backward predict content of each of a plurality of fields of the unidirectionally backward predicted frame from corresponding fields of only the temporally closest anchor frame; wherein the unidirectionally predicted frame that is predicted only from the temporally closest anchor frame comprises a frame that is defined as a bi-directionally predicted frame according to an encoding protocol for the stream of data.