Perceptually-adaptive pre-processing for motion-compensated residue in video coding

We present a perceptually-adaptive pre-processing scheme for motion-compensated residue, based on just-noticeable-distortion (JND) profile. Human eyes cannot sense any changes below the JND threshold around a pixel due to their underlying spatial/temporal masking properties. From the viewpoint of signal compression, a smaller variance of signal results in less objective distortion of the reconstructed signal for a given bit-rate. In this paper, the JND profile is incorporated into a motion-compensated residue signal preprocessor for variance reduction, aimed at coding quality enhancement. A solution of adaptively determining the parameter for the residue pre-processor is also proposed. Experimental results show that both perceptual quality and objective quality are enhanced in coded video at a given bitrate.