Transmission of Post-Filter Hints for Video Coding Schemes

In the field of video coding, it is common to apply post-filtering in order to enhance the quality of a decoded video signal. An optimal post-filter can be designed by minimizing the error between the original signal and the decoded filtered signal. This approach requires information about the statistics of the decoded image and the original signal, which is available on encoder-side only. In order to provide this necessary information to a post-filter on the decoder-side, this paper presents a technique to transmit so-called post-filter hints in the bit-stream of a video coding scheme. In H.264/AVC, mean picture quality improvements of 0.4 dB are achieved with this technique compared to H.264/AVC without post-filtering. This corresponds to a mean bit-rate reduction of 8.5% at same picture quality. The mean improvements are calculated as an average over all sequences and bit-rates that are specified in the common test conditions of JVT for professional applications as well as over additional HD sequences.