Cross-Component Sample Offset for Image and Video Coding

Existing cross-component video coding technologies have shown great potential on improving coding efficiency. The fundamental insight of cross-component coding technology is respecting the statistical correlations among different color components. In this paper, a Cross-Component Sample Offset (CCSO) approach for image and video coding is proposed inspired by the observation that, luma component tends to contain more texture, while chroma component is relatively smoother. The key component of CCSO is a non-linear offset mapping mechanism implemented as a look-up-table (LUT). The input of the mapping is the co-located reconstructed samples of luma component, and the output is offset values applied on chroma component. The proposed method has been implemented on top of a recent version of libaom. Experimental results show that the proposed approach brings 1.16% Random Access (RA) BD-rate saving on top of AV1 with marginal encoding/decoding time increase.