Joint Kalman-based noise filtering and motion compensated video coding for low bit rate videoconferencing

The problem of noise filtering for video coding applications is considered in this paper. In a previous paper by S. Olivieri and L. Albini (see Proc. ICIP´99, Kobe, Japan, Oct. 1999) an advantageous technique to combine a motion compensated (MC) noise filter with the coding loop of an MC hybrid coding scheme was illustrated, and a rate-distortion (RD) optimization framework was proposed. Here, we describe an alternative structure for denoising image sequences to be coded, which is based on Kalman filtering. Experimental results reveal that this technique provides performances as good as those of the RD-optimized noise filter of S. Olivieri and L. Albini, while the computational complexity has been greatly reduced