MAP-based post processing of video sequences using 3-D Huber-Markov random field model

The block DCT (BDCT) is by far one of the most popular transforms used in image and video coding. However, it introduces a noticeable blocking artifact at low data rates. A great deal of work has been done to remove the artifact with information extracted from the spatial and frequency domains. In this paper we address the video sequence restoration problem as a 3D Huber-Markov random field model and derive the temporal extension to traditional maximum a posteriori (MAP)-based methods. Two schemes, we call temporal MAP (TMAP) and motion compensated TMAP (MC-TMAP) respectively, are presented. We test our methods on MPEG-2 compressed sequences and evaluate their performances with traditional MAP restoration. Experimental results confirm that our schemes can significantly improve the visual quality of the reconstructed sequences.