  Motion estimation is the most critical process in video coding systems. First
of all, it has a definitive impact on the rate-distortion performance given by
the video encoder. Secondly, it is the most computationally intensive process
within the encoding loop. For these reasons, the design of high-performance
low-cost motion estimators is a crucial task in the video compression field. An
adaptive cost block matching (ACBM) motion estimation technique is presented in
this paper, featuring an excellent tradeoff between the quality of the
reconstructed video sequences and the computational effort. Simulation results
demonstrate that the ACBM algorithm achieves a slight better rate-distortion
performance than the one given by the well-known full search algorithm block
matching algorithm with reductions of up to 95% in the computational load.
