Adaptive deblocking method for low bitrate coded HEVC video

•An adaptive deblocking method for low bitrate coded HEVC video is proposed.•A pre-processing filter is applied to remove the undesired noise.•A novel corner outlier removal algorithm is introduced.•A new normal blocking artifact filtering method is designed.

HEVC in-loop deblocking filter significantly improves the subjective quality of coded video by removing blocking artifact. However, there are still visible blocking artifacts in the complex videos with fast and chaotic motions coded at a low bitrate. In this paper, we propose a three-step deblocking filter scheme, which pre-processes video to remove undesired noise, next removes the corner outliers, and then suppresses the normal blocking artifacts with adaptive deblocking filters. The whole deblocking filtering process is applied on both luma and chroma components. Experimental results show that the proposed method could effectively improve the subjective quality for various videos, and outperform other typical post-processing deblocking methods.