Patent ID: 8848799

Claim:
A method for fast motion estimation in video encoding, comprising: a) determining one or more section sizes in a current video picture for which a portion of motion estimation can be skipped during encoding of the current video picture, wherein the determining the one or more section sizes is based on a pre-computed threshold value, wherein the pre-computed threshold value corresponds to a preselected quantization parameter (QP) and a preselected quality control (QC) value, wherein the QC value controls a number of the section sizes that can be skipped; b) performing the portion of motion estimation on the current video picture on a section-by-section basis only for one or more section sizes that cannot be skipped and skipping the portion of motion estimation for one or more different section sizes for which the portion of motion estimation can be skipped; c) encoding the picture using the motion estimation performed in b) to produce an encoded picture; and d) storing or transmitting the encoded picture.