A new video coding tool, sample adaptive offset (SAO), is introduced in this paper. SAO has been adopted into the Working Draft of the new video coding standard, HighEfficiency Video Coding (HEVC). The SAO is located after deblocking in the video coding loop. The concept of SAO is to classify reconstructed pixels into different categories and then reduce the distortion by simply adding an offset for each category of pixels. The pixel intensity and edge properties are used for pixel classification. To further improve the coding efficiency, a picture can be divided into regions for localization of offset parameters. Simulation results show that SAO can achieve on average 2% bit rate reduction and up to 6% bit rate reduction. The run time increases for encoders and decoders are only 2%.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.