Prefilter Control Scheme for Low bitrate TV Distribution

In IP-based TV distribution, coding degradation is sometimes evident in critical scenes because the bit rate for compression is rather low. Prefiltering is an effective countermeasure since it replaces the coding noise with the degradation more difficult to detect visually, though it has the drawback that excessive smoothing might occur. This paper proposes a scene-adaptive method to control a prefilter separate from the encoder. By calculating block-wise motion-compensated predictive error variances and correlation coefficients, it estimates the coding noise as well as the potential improvement by prefiltering each frame, realizing a control scheme which performs prefiltering only when effective