High performance loop filter for HEVC

In this paper, an efficient loop filter is proposed to restore the decoded frame for HEVC. The loop filtering problem is modeled as an inverse problem and solved by maximum a posteriori estimation. By modeling non-local block similarity into the MRF prior, the proposed filter can be efficiently derived by solving an optimization problem. Both temporal and spatial adaptivity of the filter are considered during the implementation. Experimental results show that up to 5.6% bit rate reduction can be achieved by the proposed loop filter when compared with HEVC reference software HM13.0.