Fast motion blur compensation in HEVC using fixed-length filter

Abstract

Motion compensation is one of the most important elements in modern hybrid video coders. It utilizes temporal information to predict the current block and reduces thereby the redundancy of a video. The prediction accuracy depends on the similarity between the reference block and the current block. It is decreased by varying motion blur caused by the acceleration of the camera or certain objects in a scene. Thus, we employ fixed-length filters to compensate varying motion blur in hybrid video coding. While former approaches needed additional signaling for blurring filters or a second motion estimation, our algorithm derives the blurring filter only based on the motion vector and needs only one motion estimation. We implemented our approach in the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) reference software HM-13.0. Compared to the reference HM-13.0, we gain 2.54% in terms of BD-Rate in average for JCT-VC test sequences and 4.51% for self-recorded sequence containing lots of varying motion blur, with limited increase in coding time.