New windowing techniques for variable-size block motion compensation

The conventional overlapped block motion compensation (OBMC) technique, although effective in reducing the blocking effect for fixed-size partitioned frames, cannot be readily used for a frame partitioned region-wise or using variable-size blocks. The generalised OBMC (GOBMC) method, even though generally applicable, is not very effective in reducing the blocking effect and prediction error. Two windowing techniques are presented to reduce the blocking effect for a frame partitioned region-wise or using variable-size blocks. In the first technique, a virtual re-partitioning operation is employed, which maps a partitioned frame into its corresponding fully partitioned frame at the bottom level of the quadtree so that each resulting block has eight neighbouring blocks. In the second technique, the virtual re-partitioning operation for a given block (region) is carried out adaptively and performed locally; however, blocks (regions) need not always be virtually partitioned to the bottom level. Compared to the GOBMC method, the proposed techniques make use of more pixels in the close vicinity of boundaries of the regions in the windowing operation. Simulation results are included of applying the proposed techniques on a number of MPEG video sequences. These results indicate that the proposed techniques are superior to the GOBMC method in terms of reducing the prediction error as well as the blocking effect