At very low bit rates

the video coder based on matching pursuits proposed by Neff and Zahor can avoid producing visual-sensible block artifacts and has been proved to have better coding performance

compared with H.263 standards. But

the computation complexity of its realization is much too higher than traditional coders

because it needs to search optimal matching atoms in a redundant dictionary

and the searching burden strongly affects the efficiency of the coder. In order to advance the efficiency of traditional coders

The author first analyzes the atoms searching scheme based on energy priority

then develops a improved full searching scheme and a weighted searching scheme based on energy priority

Both novel time-frequency atoms searching algorithms improve the optimal time-frequency atoms searching scheme. At the same time

we compare and experiment the coding performance and computation efficiency of our algorithms.