Motion-compensated temporal filtering within the H.264/AVC standard

We propose an adaptive motion-compensated temporal filtering (MCTF) structure to provide efficient temporal scalability within the H.264/AVC video compression standard. MCTF has traditionally been considered within fully scalable wavelet video coders. However, motion-compensated simple 5/3 lifted temporal wavelet filtering suffers at scene changes, as well as occlusion regions. We note that the bi-directional motion compensation mode in the H.264 standard is best equipped with the state of the art adaptive features such as adaptive block size, mode switching between forward, backward and bidirectional prediction and in-loop deblocking filter. Hence, we propose a GOP structure to implement block-based adaptive MCTF within the H.264 syntax using stored B-pictures, similar to the motion-compensated 5/3 wavelet filtering. We provide experimental results to compare the results of our proposed codec with those of other scalable wavelet video coders which use MCTF. It is also possible to employ the proposed adaptive MCTF structure within fully scalable wavelet video codecs.