New approach to reducing blocking effects in stereo video coding

The correlation property of blocks may be damaged in block-based image coding, and blocking effects can be induced. Some algorithms were developed for reducing the blocking effects. However, algorithms for reducing the blocking effects in video images, especially in stereo video images, should be simple and have low computational load. In this paper, causes of inducing blocking effects in stereo video coding are analyzed, and a new algorithm for reducing three types of blocking effects is presented. For the three types of blocking effects in I-frames, three filtering schemes are proposed. For the blocking effects in P-frames and B-frames, a new method of optimizing motion estimation and disparity estimation is proposed. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is simple and efficient.