Quality improvement and performance analysis of High Efficiency Video Coding under high quantization parameters and rain streaks

Abstract

High Efficiency Video Coding standard is an advanced and widely used video coding standard in recent high-definition (HD) video application. This video codec faces many challenges during the video transmission over lower bandwidth channel. One of the main challenges is the noise removal from HD video sequences. For noise removal, this video codec has in-loop filters specifically. Although these loop filters are efficient, they are not effective in removing rain pattern from the video sequences. To overcome this problem, a denoising filter has to be added to the loop filters. For denoising, an optimized multi-delay block frequency domain (OMBFD) adaptive filter is presented in this paper. Based on the intensity of raindrop, it is identified from the successive video frames. Then, these predicted raindrops are removed using the existing loop filters. Nevertheless, still, noises present in the frame are removed using the proposed OMBFD filter. To control the process of filtering, the exponential forgetting factor which is used in the proposed denoising filter is optimized using firefly optimization algorithm. Simulation results show the proposed denoising algorithm affords promising performance improvement compared to other denoising filters.