Patent ID: 8488676

Claim:
A method of estimating a motion vector for a current macroblock within a current frame by reference to a plurality of reference blocks within a previous frame, comprising the steps of: determining an error between the current macroblock and each of the reference blocks using a weighted SAD operation, the weighted SAD operation emphasizing absolute differences corresponding to high-frequency pixels within the current macroblock, including: applying a high pass filter on each pixel within the current macroblock to determine whether or not the pixel is a high-frequency pixel, determining a corresponding weight for the pixel based on the output of the high pass filter, and accumulating absolute differences corresponding to all pixels within the current macroblock based on the corresponding weights in order to obtain the corresponding error; determining the reference block having the lowest error as a matched macroblock for the current macroblock; and defining the motion vector for the current macroblock as the displacement between the current macrob lock and the matched macroblock.