An Improved Video Encoderwith In-the-Loop De-Noising Filter for Impulse Noise Reduction

It is seen that the performance of a video codec drastically degrades for noisy sources. In this paper, we propose a novel and easy-to-implement de-noising filter, integrated within the motion estimation and motion compensation blocks of an H.264 video encoder, to reduce impulse noise from video. Performance of our proposed filter is compared with a spatial domain two-pass adaptive median filter that uses spatial information of noise. Results are obtained for several video sequences, contaminated with different levels of additive random noise, thus establishing the effectiveness of the proposed technique.