KTA employs two concatenating loop filters: the deblocking loop filter and the adaptive loop filter.
The deblocking loop filter, inherited from H.264/AVC, alleviates the blocking artifacts caused by the block-based DCT+MCP video coding framework. It uses a bank of low-pass filters, which are adaptively applied to block boundaries according to the boundary strength (BS), and provides better visual quality and improved capability to predict other pictures.
Adaptive loop filter (ALF; click here for introduction) is placed in the MCP loop after the deblocking process, and is used to restore the degraded picture (caused by compression) such that the MSE between the reconstructed and source frames is minimized. The coefficients of ALF are calculated and transmitted on a frame basis and the minimum mean squared error (MMSE) estimator is used. For each degraded frame, ALF can be applied to the entire frame or to local areas. The former is known as frame-based ALF. In the latter case, additiona[......]
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Permanent Link: Two Loop Filters in KTA
3. Adaptive Loop Filter
As far as adaptive loop filter (ALF) is concerned, there are three types of ALF: frame-based, block-based and quadtree-based ALFs. All of them are based on wiener filter, but with different filtering control basis. In frame-based ALF [VCEG-C437/AI14, C402], only one picture level flag is used to signal the decision of filtering or non-filtering.
Although wiener filter can restore the reconstructed picture to the original picture globally, there are degraded pixels locally. Since the degraded area reduce the filtering efficiency, if these areas are not filtered, the capabilities of picture restoration and loop filtering are improved. Therefore, block-based ALF [VCEG-AI18/AJ13] use explicit flags for filtering on-off on block by block basis, while quadtree-based ALF [VCEG-C181/AK22] introduces a quadtree data structure to carry out the variable-size block filtering.
3.1 Block-based Adaptive Loop Filter
Block-based ALF is an improvement of frame-based ALF. Figure 2[......]
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Permanent Link: Adaptive Post/Loop Filters in JM/KTA – Part 2
1. Introduction
The basic idea of adaptive post/loop filter is the same. Both of them use adaptive wiener filtering technique to improve the quality of reconstructed picture which is degraded by compression. The difference between them is whether the filtering process is applied in or out of the core coding loop, as shown in Figure 1, to improve the quality of reconstructed picture or just displayed picture.
Figure 1. Block diagram of JM/KTA
2. Adaptive Post Filter
In H.264/AVC, there is already an existing post-filter hint SEI message [JVT-S030/T039/U035] which provides the coefficients of a post-filter or correlation information for the design of a post-filter for potential use in post-processing of the output decoded pictures to obtain improved displayed quality.
To find the coefficients of adaptive wiener filter, the following cost function based on the whole frame is minimized:
(1)
where R is the reconstructed picture, R’ is the filtered picture, and I is the original pic[......]
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Permanent Link: Adaptive Post/Loop Filters in JM/KTA – Part 1