Improving MPEG-4 coding performance by jointly optimising compression and blocking effect elimination

In most current block-based image/video coding systems the compression stage and the deblocking stage operate separately and hence they cannot make use of each other to optimise the overall coding performance. It is suggested that the basic structure of the encoding systems should be modified such that the deblocking to be performed can be taken into account in the compression and the two processes can be jointly optimised. An example is also provided to show how this idea works successfully in an MPEG-4 codec to boost the rate-distortion performance when the suggested deblocking filter is exploited in the post-processing stage. The modification does not change the bit-stream format of the codec and hence is fully compatible with the original standard