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  • Paul Wilkins's avatar
    Changes to exhaustive motion search. · 0149fb3d
    Paul Wilkins authored
    This change alters the nature and use of exhaustive motion search.
    
    Firstly any exhaustive search is preceded by a normal step search.
    The exhaustive search is only carried out if the distortion resulting
    from the step search is above a threshold value.
    
    Secondly the simple +/- 64 exhaustive search is replaced by a
    multi stage mesh based search where each stage has a range
    and step/interval size. Subsequent stages use the best position from
    the previous stage as the center of the search but use a reduced range
    and interval size.
    
    For example:
      stage 1: Range +/- 64 interval 4
      stage 2: Range +/- 32 interval 2
      stage 3: Range +/- 15 interval 1
    
    This process, especially when it follows on from a normal step
    search, has shown itself to be almost as effective as a full range
    exhaustive search with step 1 but greatly lowers the computational
    complexity such that it can be used in some cases for speeds 0-2.
    
    This patch also removes a double exhaustive search for sub 8x8 blocks
    which also contained  a bug (the two searches used different distortion
    metrics).
    
    For best quality in my test animation sequence this patch has almost
    no impact on quality but improves encode speed by more than 5X.
    
    Restricted use in good quality speeds 0-2 yields significant quality gains
    on the animation test of 0.2 - 0.5 db with only a small impact on encode
    speed. On most clips though the quality gain and speed impact are small.
    
    Change-Id: Id22967a840e996e1db273f6ac4ff03f4f52d49aa
    0149fb3d