Macroblock-Level Adaptive Frequency Weighting

In the perceptual video coding scheme, the properties of the human visual system (HVS) are usually used to improve the subjective quality. The frequency sensitivity is one of the most important properties of HVS and related techniques have been adopted in many video coding standards, such as MPEG2 and H.264/AVC High Profile. However, the frequency weighting algorithms used in those standards are all in picture level. In this paper, a novel macroblock (MB)-level adaptive frequency weighting algorithm is proposed. Compared with the picture-level adaptive frequency weighting algorithms, the proposed algorithm can select different frequency weighting strategies and quantization matrices for each MB. The experimental results show that the proposed MBAFW algorithm can improve the subjective quality significantly.