EFFICIENT LOW-COMPLEXITY VIDEO COMPRESSION

Disclosed is a low-complexity and yet efficient lossy method to compress distortion information for motion estimation, resulting in significant reduction in needed storage capacity. A system for implementing the method and a computer-readable medium for storing the method are also disclosed. The method includes determining and storing a distortion value for each trial motion vector in a plurality of trial motion vectors. Each trial motion vector specifies a position of a search region relative to a reference frame. The method further includes compressing each of the distortion values as a fixed number of bits based upon a minimum distortion value amongst the stored distortion values, and re-storing each compressed distortion value in place of its uncompressed value.