• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 2009.01a
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• pp.830-833
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• 2009

Deblocking Filter (DF) is newly introduced into H.264/AVC to remove blocky artifacts. It improves the picture quality and the improved picture is set to the frame buffer for motion compensation. As a result, higher coding efficiency is achieved by DF. However, if the original image has heavily-slanted patterns, DF removes the edges to be kept because it is applied only perpendicularly to the block boundaries. In this paper, we propose Edge Adaptive Deblocking Filter (EADF) which is applied not only for the perpendicular but also for several slanted directions to deal with the problem. Simulation results showed us that EADF was especially effective for the sequence "Foreman" with PSNR gain of 0.04 dB.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.45 no.4
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• pp.41-49
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• 2008

H.264/AVC supports variable block motion compensation, multiple reference images, 1/4-pixel motion vector accuracy, and in-loop deblocking filter, compared with the existing compression technologies. While these coding technologies are major functions of compression rate improvement, they lead to high complexity at the same time. For the H.264 video coding technology to be actually applied on low-end / low-bit rates terminals more extensively, it is essential to improve tile coding speed. Currently the deblocking filter that can improve the moving picture's subjective image quality to a certain degree is used on low-end terminals to a limited extent due to computational complexity. In this paper, a performance improvement method of the deblocking filter that efficiently reduces the blocking artifacts occurred during the compression of low-bit rates digital motion pictures is suggested. In the method proposed in this paper, the image's spatial correlational characteristics are extracted by using the variable block information of motion compensation; the filtering is divided into 4 modes according to the characteristics, and adaptive filtering is executed in the divided regions. The proposed deblocking method reduces the blocking artifacts, prevents excessive blurring effects, and improves the performance about $30{\sim}40%$ compared with the existing method.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.43 no.1 s.343
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• pp.79-84
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• 2006

This paper proposed a novel H.264 deblocking filter for low-power mobile multimedia SoCs. In H.264 deblocking filter, filtering can be skipped on some pixels when pixel value differences satisfy some specific conditions. Furthermore, whole filtering can be skipped when quantization parameter is less than 16. Based on these features, power consumption can be significantly reduced by shutting down deblocking filter partially or as a whole. The proposed deblocking filter can shut down partial or whole blocks with simple control circuits. Common hardware performs both horizontal filtering and vertical filtering. It was implemented in silicon chip using $0.35{\mu}m$ standard cell library technology. The gate count is about 20,000 gates. The maximum operation frequency is 108MHz. The maximum throughput is 30 frame/s with CCIR601 image format.

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.129-142
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• 2016

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 block-based 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.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.925-933
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• 2019

In this paper, we implement ZYNQ SoC-based post-processing system that utilizes partial reconfiguration to remove blocking artifacts generated by compression algorithm. Hardware implementation of the deblocking filter in a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) provides high computational capability and can be partially reconfigured to process 1080p images in real time. Partially reconfigurable areas in FPGA can be utilized to use hardware more efficiently in highly resource-constrained embedded systems. Experimental results of the proposed system show improvement of visual quality both objectively and subjectively with 0.6dB higher PSNR after deblocking filtering process. The measured power consumption of the deblocking filter during run-time is 68.33mW.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.49 no.8
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• pp.63-72
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• 2012

In this paper, we proposed a parallel architecture of line & block edge filter for high-performance H.264/AVC deblocking filter for Quad Full High Definition(Quad FHD) video real time processing. To improve throughput, we designed 4-parallel block edge filter with 16 line edge filter. To reduce internal buffer size and processing cycle, we scheduled 4-parallel zig-zag scan order as deblocking filtering order. To avoid data conflicts we placed 1 delay cycle between block edge filtering. We implemented interleaving buffer, as internal buffer of block edge filter, to sharing buffer for reducing buffer size. The proposed architecture was simulated in 0.18um standard cell library. The maximum operation frequency is 108MHz. The gate count is 140.16Kgates. The proposed H.264/AVC deblocking filter can support Quad FHD at 113.17 frames per second by running at 90MHz.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.45 no.1
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• pp.64-70
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• 2008

The H.264 standard is widely used due to the high compression rate and quality. The deblocking filter of the H.264 standard improves the quality of images by eliminating blocking artifacts of pictures, and it requires a lot of computation. We propose a new hardware architecture for the deblocking filter with pipelined architecture, 1-D filters which support both horizontal and vertical filtering and efficient memory management. Four memory blocks are configured for the efficient storage and access of the current macroblock and adjacent referenced sub-macroblocks, and the pixel data from the motion compensation unit can be transferred without waiting during the computation cycles of the deblocking filter. The number of computation cycles and the hardware area are reduced using the proposed architecture, and the performance of the H.264 decoder is improved. We design the deblocking filter using Verilog-HDL and implement using an FPGA. The designed deblocking filter can be used for decoding HD quality images at 77 MHz.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2014.10a
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• pp.755-758
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• 2014

In this paper, we propose effective Deblocking Filter hardware architecture for High Efficiency Video Coding encoder. we propose Deblocking Filter hardware architecture with less processing time, filter ordering for low area design, effective memory architecture and four-pipeline for a high performance HEVC(High Efficiency Video Coding) encoder. Proposed filter ordering can be used to reduce delay according to preprocessing. It can be used for realtime single-port SRAM read and write. it can be used in parallel processing by using two filters. Using 10 memory is effective for solving the hazard caused by a single-port SRAM. Also the proposed filter can be used in low-voltage design by using clock gating architecture in 4-pipeline. The proposed Deblocking Filter encoder architecture is designed by Verilog HDL, and implemented by 100k logic gates in TSMC $0.18{\mu}m$ process. At 150MHz, the proposed Deblocking Filter encoder can support 4K Ultra HD video encoding at 30fps, and can be operated at a maximum speed of 200MHz.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.631-643
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• 2016

Due to the block-based discrete cosine transform (BDCT), JPEG compressed images usually exhibit blocking artifacts. When the bit rates are very low, blocking artifacts will seriously affect the image's visual quality. A bilateral filter has the features for edge-preserving when it smooths images, so we propose an adaptive-weighted bilateral filter based on the features. In this paper, an image-deblocking scheme using this kind of adaptive-weighted bilateral filter is proposed to remove and reduce blocking artifacts. Two parameters of the proposed adaptive-weighted bilateral filter are adaptive-weighted so that it can avoid over-blurring unsmooth regions while eliminating blocking artifacts in smooth regions. This is achieved in two aspects: by using local entropy to control the level of filtering of each single pixel point within the image, and by using an improved blind image quality assessment (BIQA) to control the strength of filtering different images whose blocking artifacts are different. It is proved by our experimental results that our proposed image-deblocking scheme provides good performance on eliminating blocking artifacts and can avoid the over-blurring of unsmooth regions.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.47 no.3
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• pp.32-43
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• 2010

This paper presents deblocking filter for low-complexity video decoder. Baseline profile of the H.264/AVC used for mobile devices such as mobile phones has two times higher compression performance than the MPEG-4 Visual but it has a problem of serious complexity as using 1/4-pel interpolation filter, adaptive entropy model and deblocking filter. This paper presents low-complexity deblocking filter for decreasing complexity of decoder with preserving the coding efficiency of the H.264/AVC. In this paper, the proposed low-complexity deblocking filter decreased 49% of branch instruction than conventional approach as calculating value of BS by using the CBP. In addition, a range of filtering of strong filter applied in intra macroblock boundaries was limited to two pixels. According to the experimental results, the proposed low-complexity deblocking filter decreased -0.02% of the BDBitrate comparison with baseline profile of the H.264/AVC, decreased 42% of the complexity of deblocking filter, and decreased 8.96% of the complexity of decoder.