Reliability-Based Deblocking Filter for Wyner-Ziv Video Coding

In Wyner-Ziv coding, video signals are reconstructed by correcting side information generated by block-based motion estimation/compensation at the decoder. The correction is not always accurate due to the limited number of parity bits and early stopping of low-density parity check accumulate (LDPCA) decoding in distributed video coding, or due to the limited number of measurements in distributed compressive video sensing. The blocking artifacts caused by blockbased processing are usually conspicuous in smooth areas and degrade the perceptual quality of the reconstructed video. Conventional deblocking filters try to remove the artifacts by treating both sides of the block boundary equally; however, coding errors generated by block-based processing are not necessarily the same on both sides of the block boundaries. Such a block-wise difference is exploited in this paper to improve deblocking for Wyner-Ziv frameworks by designing a filter where the deblocking strength at each block can be non-identical, depending on the reliability of the reconstructed pixels. Test results show that the proposed filter not only improves subjective quality by reducing the coding artifacts considerably, but also gains rate distortion performance.