Block Matching Algorithms for the Estimation of Motion in Image Sequences: Analysis

Several video coding standards and techniques have been introduced for multimedia applications, particularly h.26x series for video processing. These standards employ motion estimation process for reducing the amount of data that is required to store or transmit the video. Motion estimation process is an inextricable part of the video coding as it removes the temporal redundancy between successive frames of video sequences. This paper is about these motion estimation algorithms, their search procedures, complexity, advantages, and limitations. A survey of motion estimation algorithms including full search algorithm, many fast search, and fast full search block-based algorithms has been presented. An evaluation of up to date motion estimation algorithms, based on a number of empirical results on several test video sequences, is presented as well.