Motion-compensated techniques for enhancement of low-quality compressed videos

Algorithms for enhancement of low quality compressed videos are described and evaluated in this paper. Cascaded and combined spatio-temporal filters using hierarchical motion estimation and occlusion area detection are investigated for removal of severe coding artifacts and temporal flickering. Both objective and subjective evaluations prove that temporal filtering can significantly improve the video quality of low bit rate video sequences. The proposed methods could therefore be a differentiating feature for future IPTV design.