Rate-distortion optimization of spatial filters for motion-compensated video coding

We propose a novel motion-compensated prediction scheme for improving the rate-distortion performance of motion compensated video coders. Our scheme uses a codebook of filters so that the prediction block is encoded by specifying jointly an integer motion vector and the index of a filter in the codebook. The two-dimensional spatial filter furnishes simultaneously the functions of motion compensation, pixel interpolation and noise reduction. With such a filtering framework, motion compensation can be performed at arbitrary precision and the codebook optimized for specific video data. Incorporated into an ITU-T H.264 coder, the proposed motion-compensated prediction scheme improves coder performance by increasing the reconstruction PSNR by 0.2 dB or reducing the bit rate by 5 %.