In-Loop Selective Decontouring Algorithm in Video Coding

Contour artifact is known as the unintentional result of quantizing a flat area that has smooth gradients. In this letter, a decontouring algorithm is proposed to efficiently remove false contours that occur in typical block-based video coding applications. First, the algorithm goes through a refinement stage to determine candidate blocks probably having noticeable false contours with different kinds of features in a block. Then, pseudo-random noise masking is applied to those blocks to mitigate the contour artifacts. This block-based selective decontouring can efficiently remove the unnecessary processing of those blocks that have no false contour, which incidentally ensures a minor penalty in visual quality and computational complexity. The proposed algorithm was demonstrated, integrated into H.264/AVC, that visual quality can be significantly enhanced with an ignorable rate-distortion (RD) loss and an minor increase in computational complexity.