Sample Adaptive Offset Design in HEVC

This paper is devoted to Sample Adaptive Offset (SAO). This technique was recently added into High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard. The concept of SAO is to reduce sample distortion of a region by classifying the region samples into multiple categories, obtaining an offset for each category, and then adding the offset to each sample, where the classifier index and the offsets are coded in the bit stream.