A Study on a Compensation of Decoded Video Quality and an Enhancement of Encoding Speed

There are two problems in H.26X compression technique. One is compressing time in encoding process and the other is degradation of the decoded video quality due to high compression rate. For transferring moving pictures in real-time, it is required to adopt massively high compression. In this case, there are a lot of losses of an original video data and that results in degradation of quality. Especially degradation called by blocking artifact may be produced. The blocking artifact effect is produced by DCT-based coding techniques because they operate without considering correlation between pixels in block boundaries. So it represents discontinuity between adjacent blocks. This paper describes methods of quality compensation for H.26x decoded data and enhancing encoding speed for real-time operation. Our goal of the quality compensation is not to make the decoded video identical to a original video but to make it perceived better through human eyes. We suggest an algorithm that reduces block artifact and clears decoded video in decoder. To enhance encoding speed, we adopt new four-step search algorithm. As shown in the experimental result, the quality compensation provides better video quality because of reducing blocking artifact. And then new four-step search algorithm with $MMX^{TM}$ implementation improves encoding speed from 2.5 fps to 17 fps.