Adaptive Frequency Weighting for High-Performance Video Coding

The benefits of utilizing the spatial-frequency sensitivity of the human visual system in video coding have been known for decades and are incorporated into video standards, such as MPEG2, MPEG4, and H.264/AVC, as well as into still image-coding standards, such as JPEG and JPEG-2000. However, all of these standards utilize frequency weighting that is adaptive only at the picture level. In contrast with such picture-level adaptive frequency-weighting algorithms, we describe a coding approach in which a macroblock-level adaptive frequency-weighting (MBAFW) algorithm is used. We show that for the bitrate, quality levels, and resolutions typically associated with high-definition video, MBAFW can lead to overall bitrate reductions typically in the 5%–9% range over the methods used in state-of-the-art video-coding standards.