Motion compensation (MC) is a critical component in terms of computational complexity and memory bandwidth. The MC complexity of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) for UHD contents significantly increased more than that of AVC/H.264. This paper reveals and analyzes a feature of generalized P and B pictures in HEVC and introduces a simple and effective method for MC complexity reduction that can be exploited at both the encoder and decoder without affecting the compression performance. The proposed method bypasses the \(L1\) interpolation process when the \(L0\) and \(L1\) motion information of a bipredicted block are identical. The simulation results show that the time reductions of 14.5% and 6.4% for the encoder and decoder, respectively, were achieved for LD-B configuration without any changes in coding results. The proposed method was adopted in the HEVC test model as a non-normative complexity reduction tool.

A deblocking filtering method that reduces the blocking artifacts that result from the use of the illumination change-adaptive motion compensation method, which was already adopted in the current multiview video coding (MVC) standard, is introduced. When the macroblock (MB)-based illumination compensation method is used to compensate local illumination changes in multiview video sequences, the neighboring MBs could have different illumination values that represent the average values of the luminance MBs, horizontally and vertically. This phenomenon causes horizontal/vertical blocking artifacts on the MB boundaries due to the difference in illumination between the neighboring MBs. The proposed deblocking filtering method is designed to reduce this phenomenon by using the adequately modified boundary strength derivation process of the current H.264/AVC deblocking filtering mechanism. The proposed deblocking filtering method improves the subjective video quality and provides slightly better objective video quality in multiview video sequences.