A Novel MBAFF Scheme of AVS

Adaptive frame/field coding techniques have been adopted in many international video standards for interlaced sequence coding. When the frame/field adaptation is applied on the picture level, the coding efficiency is improved greatly, compared with the pure frame coding or the pure field coding. The picture-level adaptive frame/field coding (PAFF) selects frame coding or field coding once for one picture. If this frame/field adaptation is extended to Macro Block (MB) level, the coding efficiency will be further increased. In this paper, a novel MB-level adaptive frame/field (MBAFF) coding scheme is proposed. In the proposed MBAFF scheme, the top field of the current picture is used as a reference. The experiments are implemented on the platforms of Audio Video coding Standard (AVS) base profile and H.264/AVC, respectively. On the AVS platform, 0.35dB gain can be achieved averagely, compared with AVS1.0 anchor. On the H.264/AVC platform, 0.16dB gain can be achieved averagely, compared with MBAFF scheme of H.264/AVC. Additionally, an extensive subjective quality enhancement can be achieved by the proposed scheme.