A Fast Two Dimensional Deblocking Filter for H.264/AVC Video Coding

H.264/AVC as the most recent video coding standard delivers significantly better performance compared to previous standards, supporting higher video quality over lower bit rate channels. The H.264 in-loop deblocking filter is one of the several complex techniques that have realized this superior coding quality. The deblocking filter is a computationally and data intensive tool resulting in increased execution time of both the encoding and decoding processes. In this paper and in order to reduce the deblocking complexity, we propose a new 2D deblocking filtering algorithm based on the existing 1D method of the H.264/AVC standard. Simulation results indicate that the proposed technique achieves a 40% speed improvement compared to the existing 1D H.264/AVC deblocking filter, while affecting the SNR by 0.15% in average