Performance Improvement of H.264/AVC Deblocking Filter by Using Variable Block Sizes

Abstract

Currently H.264/AVC supports variable block motion compensation, multiple reference images, 1/4-pixel motion vector accuracy, and in-loop deblocking filter, compared with the existing compression technologies. While these coding technologies are major functions of compression rate improvement, they lead to high complexity at the same time. For the H.264 video coding technology to be actually applied on low-end / low-bit rates terminals more extensively, it is essential to improve the coding speed. Currently the deblocking filter that can improve the moving picture’s subjective image quality to a certain degree is used on low-end terminals to a limited extent due to computational complexity. In this paper, a performance improvement method of the deblocking filter that efficiently reduces the blocking artifacts occurred during the compression of low-bit rates digital motion pictures is suggested. Blocking artifacts are plaid images appear on the block boundaries due to DCT and quantization. In the method proposed in this paper, the image’s spatial correlational characteristics are extracted by using the variable block information of motion compensation; the filtering is divided into 4 modes according to the characteristics, and adaptive filtering is executed in the divided regions. The proposed deblocking method reduces the blocking artifacts, prevents excessive blurring effects, and improves the performance about 40% compared with the existing method.