Encoder-aware motion compensated temporal filtering for video compression

In this paper, we present an encoder-aware motion compensated temporal pre-processing filter (EA-MCTF) that adapts the filter on a block-basis based upon the spatio-temporal content properties and block-level encoding parameters. Some sample parameters include block-level QP, variance and mean-squared error of motion compensated block difference, slice types of adjoining frames, and frequency of a block being used as a reference. Applying the EA-MCTF to a HEVC encoder yields -12.4% average VMAF BD-rate savings over unfiltered encodings, and furthermore, the EA-MCTF yields a superior BD-rate and computational complexity performance over the MCTF available in the HEVC reference software.