Quality-Aware Merge Candidate Construction For Video Coding

Efficient construction of merge candidate list is a critical issue in terms of the advanced inter coding technologies. Existing merge candidate list construction methods are typically realized by traversing the potential candidates in a predefined order, without considering different qualities of the potential candidates. In this paper, we propose a quality-aware merge candidate list construction method based on template matching (TM) cost sorting, termed as QAMC. Instead of checking and appending potential candidates based on a predefined traversing order, QAMC is proposed to select and rank potential merge candidates according to the quality, where the quality is measured by the distortion between a reconstructed template region and its reference region. Simulation results on ECM-2.0 demonstrate that QAMC provides 0.27% and 0.32% coding gains respectively for RA and LDB configurations, with reasonable complexity increase.