Macroblock-based adaptive interpolation filter method using new filter selection in H.264/AVC

Abstract

The macroblock (MB)-based adaptive interpolation filter method has been considered to be able to achieve high coding efficiency in H.264/AVC. Although the conventional cost functions have showed a good performance in terms of rate and distortion, it still leaves room for improvement. To improve coding efficiency, we introduce a new cost function which considers two bit rates, motion vector and prediction error, and reconstruction error of MB. The filter which minimizes the proposed cost function is adaptively selected per MB. Experimental results show that the adaptive interpolation filter with the proposed cost function significantly improves the coding efficiency compared to ones using conventional cost function. It leads to about a 5.19% (1 reference frame) and 5.14% (5 reference frames) bit rate reduction on average compared to H.264/AVC, respectively.