  This paper proposes a rate-based candidate elimination strategy for Motion
Estimation, which is considered one of the main sources of encoder complexity.
We build from findings of previous works that show that selected motion vectors
are generally near the predictor to propose a solution that uses the motion
vector bitrate to constrain the candidate search to a subset of the original
search window, resulting in less distortion computations. The proposed method
is not tied to a particular search pattern, which makes it applicable to
several ME strategies. The technique was tested in the VVC reference software
implementation and showed complexity reductions of over 80% at the cost of an
average 0.74% increase in BD-Rate with respect to the original TZ Search
algorithm in the LDP configuration.
