A rate-distortion optimal video pre-processing algorithm

Pre-processing algorithms improve the quality of a compression system by removing unimportant data before encoding. This enhances both the visual quality and coding efficiency of the system. We cast the pre-processing problem in the operational rate-distortion framework. Filtering the displaced frame difference is the focus, and the proposed method couples the choice of the quantization scale to the response of the prefilter. Coding errors are then addressed by penalizing significant differences between coded blocks. Finally, experimental results illustrate the efficacy of the method within the context of an MPEG-2 coding scenario.