Patent 7953154 was granted and assigned to Hitachi on May, 2011 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
In the motion search in the inter-frame prediction coding, parameters necessary for the motion search, such as sample-point spacing and sample-point number in the step search, are controlled using a unit for calculating the complexity of an image and a unit for estimating the movement amount of the image. This configuration makes it possible to provide the scheme for searching for the high-speed and high-accuracy motion vector, and the image coding device for performing this motion search.