Coding efficiency improvement using inter-picture processing of quantization error

As standard video encoder techniques have matured, their rate of improvement has slowed. Greater improvements are possible with purely new coding techniques; however, these are incompatible with conventional methods. As an alternative, a new coding concept with semi-compatibility has been proposed, and an enhancement to I-pictures efficiency has been discussed. This applied method reduces the quantization error using motion compensated inter-picture processing. In this report, we apply this method to P-pictures to improve the efficiency of B-pictures. The quantization error component of the prediction signal is canceled by averaging the bi-directional prediction. Experiments using MPEG-4 show significant improvement in the coding efficiency using the proposed method. The maximum PSNR gain reaches 2.3 dB in a static sequence. At least 0.5 dB can be achieved in a high motion sequence. Furthermore, the proposed method is more useful for the larger P-picture period.