H.264 deblocking filter enhancement

This paper proposes new software-based techniques for speeding and reducing the complexity of the deblocking filter used in the state-of-the-art H.264 international video coding standard to improve the visual quality of the decoded video frames. The proposed techniques are classified as standard-compliant and standard-noncompliant techniques. The standard-compliant techniques optimize the standard filter through optimizing the boundary strength calculation and group filtering of macroblocks. The standard-noncompliant techniques predict the new boundary strength and edge detection conditions from previous values. Experimental results on both an embedded platform and a desktop PC show significant increment in performance improvement that reaches 47% for the standard-compliant techniques and 80% for the standard-noncompliant techniques. They also demonstrate that for standard-noncompliant techniques the quality degradation computed using the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio is insignificant.