Enhanced reconstruction of AVC/H.264 intra video based on motion compensated temporal filtering and total-variation regularization

This paper proposes an enhanced reconstruction method of AVC/H.264 intra video based on motion compensated temporal filtering (MCTF) and total-variation (TV) regularization. The MCTF attenuates temporal fluctuations in block transform coefficient values of individual decoded video frames on the basis of motion estimation (ME). However, the attenuated block transform coefficients lead to spatial discontinuities on the associated image area. The TV regularization technique reduces the spatial discontinuities, and also suppresses quantization noises of the image edge vicinities that are supposed to belong to a smooth object while keeping the image edge sharpness. The proposed reconstruction method thus enhances the quality of decoded video frames degraded by flicker artifacts and ringing noises. Simulation results show that the proposed method improves the subjective video quality of AVC/H.264 intra video, and the attainable bit rate up to 16.1% at the same objective video quality.