Video Coding Pre-Processing Based on Rate-Distortion Optimized Weighted Guided Filter

In video coding, it is always an intractable problem to compress high frequency components including noise and visually imperceptible content that consumes large amount bandwidth resources while providing limited quality improvement. Direct using of denoising methods causes coding performance degradation, and hence not suitable for video coding scenario. In this work, we propose a video pre-processing approach by leveraging edge preserving filter specifically designed for video coding, of which filter parameters are optimized in the sense of rate-distortion (R-D) performance. The proposed pre-processing method removes low R-D cost-effective components for video encoder while keeping important structural components, leading to higher coding efficiency and also better subjective quality. Comparing with the conventional denoising filters, our proposed pre-processing method using the R-D optimized edge preserving filter can improve the coding efficiency by up to −5.2% BD-rate with low computational complexity.