Variable Block-Based Deblocking Filter for H.264/AVC

The deblocking filter in H.264/AVC is used on low-end terminals to a limited extent due to computational complexity. In this paper, variable block-based deblocking filter that efficiently eliminates the blocking artifacts occurred during the compression of low-bit rates digital motion pictures is suggested. Blocking artifacts are plaid images appear on the block boundaries due to DCT and quantization. In the method proposed in this paper, the image´s spatial correlational characteristics are extracted by using the variable block information of motion compensation; the filtering is divided into 4 modes according to the characteristics, and adaptive filtering is executed in the divided regions. The proposed deblocking method eliminates the blocking artifacts, prevents excessive blurring effects, and improves the performance about 40% compared with the existing method.