Estimation of Fade and Dissolve Parameters for Weighted Prediction in H.264/AVC

Weighted prediction (WP) is one way of overcoming the limitations of simple motion compensation for scenes with gradual transitions such as fades or dissolves. In WP, the predictions for inter coded blocks are obtained from scaled versions of the reference frames. H.264/AVC is the first video coding standard that has incorporated WP tools. In this paper, we focus on the estimation of weights for WP in dissolves. Our findings indicate that the estimation approaches for dissolves should be different from the estimation approaches for fades. Specifically, estimating the weights jointly for the two reference frames of B-frames gives better performance for dissolves under most circumstances.