Improving MPEG-4 coding performance by jointly optimising compression and blocking effect elimination

In most current block-based image/video coding systems the compression stag e and the deblocking stage operate separately and hence they cannot make us e of each other to optimise the overall coding performance. It is suggested that the basic structure of the encoding systems should be modified such t hat the deblocking to be performed can be taken into account in the compres sion and the two processes can be jointly optimised. An example is also pro vided to show how this idea works successfully in a MPEG-4 codec to boost t he rate-distortion performance when the suggested deblocking filter is expl oited in the post-processing stage. The modification does not change the bi t-stream format of the codec and hence is fully compatible with the origina l standard.