Inter-Frame Post-Processing for Intra-Coded Video

Abstract

We propose a video codec architecture based on mixed quality frames which allows for low-complexity intra-coded video to undergo inter-frame post-processing to improve its rate-distortion performance. The video sequence is divided into key and non-key frames by applying different quantization parameters among them. The application of different quantization parameters reduces the bit-rate, but also reduces the quality of the non-key frames. In order to enhance the quality of these non-key frames at the decoding process without additional information, we propose the use of the higher quality (key) frames through motion estimation. For that, in blocks where key and non-key frames “match”, we try to apply details of key frames to non-key ones. Tests were carried out with H.264-Intra, Motion JPEG 2000 and Motion JPEG video sequences, recording PSNR improvements of up to 1 dB.