Adaptive De-blocking Filter for Low Bit Rate Applications

摘要

In block-based video compression technology, blocking artifacts are obvious because of the luminance and chrominance discontinuities which are caused by block-based discrete cosine transform (DCT) and motion compensation. As a kind of solution, an in-loop filter has been successfully used in H.264 adapting to quantization parameter and video content. In this paper, blocking artifacts distribution properties are analyzed carefully to reflect the blocking effect more accurately in the low bit rate applications. Two important parameters, named blocking severity and pixel variation, are defined to describe the boundary strength and the gradient of the samples across the edge respectively. Through series of statistical data retrieval and analysis for these parameters using multiple representative video sequences, a novel blocking artifacts distribution model is concluded. Based on this distribution model, an improved filter is proposed to H.264 with novel strength determination rule and different alpha model. Comparing with H.264 anchor results, the proposed de-blocking filter shows better performance especially in subjective aspect, which could be widely used in low bit rate applications.