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A Novel SAO-based Filtering Technique for Reduction in Temporal Flickering Artifacts in H.265/HEVC

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Abstract

This paper presents a novel filtering technique based on sample adaptive offset (SAO) in H.265/high-efficiency video coding (HEVC) for reduction in the temporal flickering artifacts and improving the coding performance. SAO is a newly introduced technique for in-loop filtering in H.265/HEVC, which derives the offsets independently for each frame in the spatial domain without considering temporal frame correlation. As a result, the temporal distortion artifacts which will have a negative effect on the subjective quality, such as flickering artifacts, cannot be effectively addressed. In this paper, the rate-distortion optimization of the newly developed SAO method, referred to as Inter-SAO, is performed on the residual samples between adjacent frames. Inter-SAO and SAO in the reference software of H.265/HEVC (i.e., the test model HM) are then combined to form the novel in-loop filter-based method, denoted as 3D-SAO filtering method, where both spatial information and temporal information are effectively utilized to reduce the overall distortion in reconstructed videos. Compared with the SAO in HM, 3D-SAO has demonstrated its advanced performance for flickering artifacts suppression. Furthermore, 3D-SAO improves the coding efficiency compared with the SAO in HM with a performance gain of up to 0.91 dB in \(\Delta PSNR\), 1.74 dB in \(\Delta PSPNR\) and 7.33 % in BD-rate reduction.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation Research Program of China (No. 61371089).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electronics and Information, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China

    Kaifang Yang, Shuai Wan, Yanchao Gong & Yan Feng

  2. School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, VIC, 3001, Australia

    Hong Ren Wu

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  1. Kaifang Yang
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  2. Shuai Wan
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  3. Yanchao Gong
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  4. Hong Ren Wu
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  5. Yan Feng
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Correspondence to Kaifang Yang.

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Yang, K., Wan, S., Gong, Y. et al. A Novel SAO-based Filtering Technique for Reduction in Temporal Flickering Artifacts in H.265/HEVC. Circuits Syst Signal Process 35, 4099–4128 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-016-0251-5

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