Global motion temporal filtering for in-loop deblocking

One of the most severe problems in hybrid video coding is its block-based approach, which leads to distortions called blocking artifacts. These artifacts affect not only the subjective perception at the receiver but also the motion compensated prediction (MCP) that generates a prediction signal from previously decoded pictures. It is therefore directly connected to the amount of data that has to be transmitted. In this paper, we propose a technique called global motion temporal filtering for blocking artifact reduction. Other than common deblocking techniques, this approach does not reduce the blocking artifacts spatially. Filtering is performed temporally using a set of neighboring pictures from the picture buffer. This approach is incorporated into an H.264/AVC reference software. Experimental evaluation shows that the proposed technique significantly improves the quality in terms of rate-distortion performance.