A fast and qualitypreserving method for H.264 encoding using dynamic SAD maps It is well known that motion estimation is the most computationally intensive processing unit of the H.264 video encoder. Various fast motion estimation algorithms have been proposed to reduce its complexity. Generally, these approaches achieve speedup by reducing the number of candidate search points within the search window. In this paper, we propose a new method, which uses the SumofAbsoluteDifferences mapping (SAD map) to dynamically cache the SAD values and then reuse them for different block sizes. Experimental results on standard video sequences verified that the proposed method is capable of increasing the encoder speed by up to 15% without any loss in PSNR value or increase in bit rate. Due to its generic nature, this method can be applied in any fast motion estimation methods although it is especially effective in the full search motion estimation method.

Enhanced SAD reuse fast motion estimation H.264 is a new video coding standard which outperforms the previous video coding standards. It uses many advanced video coding techniques to improve the coding performance. Variable block size motion estimation (ME) is one of the techniques that contributes to the excellent performance of H.264 but it is computational intensive. In this paper, a fast SAD reuse ME algorithm is proposed which reuses SAD within the same macroblock and uses patternbased ME and refinement search to reduce the computational complexity of variable block size ME with a little degradation of coding performance in terms of PSNR and bitrate. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm reduces the ME time by more than 90% on average with only a little degradation of coding performance when comparing with that of the Fast Full Search (FFS).