Video technology promises to be the key for the transmission of motion
video. A number of video compression techniques and standards have been
introduced in the past few years, particularly the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 for
interactive multimedia and for digital NTSC and HDTV applications, and
H.2611H.263 for video telecommunications. These techniques use motion
estimation techniques to reduce the amount of data that is stored and
transmitted for each frame. This book is about these motion estimation
algorithms, their complexity, implementations, advantages, and
drawbacks. First, we present an overview of video compression techniques
with an emphasis to techniques that use motion estimation, such as MPEG
and H.2611H.263. Then, we give a survey of current motion estimation
search algorithms, including the exhaustive search and a number of fast
search algorithms. An evaluation of current search algorithms, based on
a number of experiments on several test video sequences, is presented as
well. The theoretical framework for a new fast search algorithm,
Densely-Centered Uniform-P Search (DCUPS), is developed and presented in
the book. The complexity of the DCUPS algorithm is comparable to other
popular motion estimation techniques, however the algorithm shows
superior results in terms of compression ratios and video qUality. We
should stress out that these new results, presented in Chapters 4 and 5,
have been developed by Joshua Greenberg, as part of his M.Sc. thesis
entitled "Densely-Centered Uniform P-Search: A Fast Motion Estimation
Algorithm" (FAU, 1996).