Reusing the H.264/AVC deblocking filter for efficient spatio-temporal prediction in video coding

The prediction step is a very important part of hybrid video codecs for effectively compressing video sequences. While existing video codecs predict either in temporal or in spatial direction only, the compression efficiency can be increased by a combined spatio-temporal prediction. In this paper we propose an algorithm for reusing the H.264/AVC deblocking filter for spatio-temporal prediction. Reusing this highly op timized filter allows for a very low computational complexity of this prediction mode and an average rate reduction of up to 7.2% can be achieved.