Optimization of the deblocking filter in H.264 codec for real time implementation.

摘要

H.264 standard provides a broad range of low bit rate and high bit rate multimedia applications with high reliability and efficient coding performance when transporting compressed video through existing and future networks. At low bit rate applications, the artifacts are visible in the H.264 decoded video. Prominent among them is blocking artifact. It is caused mainly due to the use of block-based transform coding and coarse quantization of the transform coefficients. H.264 standard uses an in-loop deblocking filter as a part of the standard to reduce the blocking artifacts. The main drawback of the deblocking filter is its implementation complexity. It takes approximately one-third of the computational resources of the decoder. The optimization of the code does not help much as some of the branches are inherited to the algorithm itself. This gives rise to a need of a simple deblocking algorithm with reduced implementation complexity. The objective of the research is to develop an algorithm, which reduces the implementation complexity while maintaining the perceptual quality of the existing deblocking algorithm.;In the proposed method, the maximum and minimum values among the six pixels across an edge are computed to decide whether the pixels of the block should be filtered or not. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)