Two-bit transform using local binary pattern method for low-complexity block motion estimation

Low bit-depth representation-based motion estimation approaches have been drawing considerable attention recently, mainly because of their small hardware footprint. In this paper, a new two-bit transform using a local binary pattern (LBP) for low-complexity motion estimation is proposed. The proposed approach utilizes the LBP method to obtain two-bit representations of video frames in the binarization process. Video frames are transformed into their low bit-depth representations by the LBP and then a motion estimation process is carried out using these binary frames. A Boolean exclusive-OR operation is used to calculate the number of nonmatching points metric instead of the conventional sum of absolute differences metric in the motion estimation stage. The proposed method reduces the computational complexity, especially in the binarization stage, while improving the motion estimation accuracy compared to existing one-bit and two-bit transform-based low-complexity motion estimation approaches in the literature.