The Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (jct-vc) of itu-t wp3/16 and iso/iec jtc 1/ sc 29/ wg 11 held its tenth meeting during 11-20 July 2012 at the City Conference Centre (ccc), a k. a

JCTVC-J0394 Crosscheck of J0207: Improved type coding for SAO [D.-K. Kwon (TI)] [late]
JCTVC-J0103 AHG6: Decoupling SAO LCU on/off from SAO type [I. S. Chong, M. Karczewicz (Qualcomm), C.-W. Hsu, C.-M. Fu, T.-D. Chuang, Y.-W. Huang, S. Lei (MediaTek)]

In HM-7.0, each LCU has one SAO type for each color component, and the SAO type can represent SAO-off, EO, or BO. In this proposal, SAO on/off signaling is decoupled from the SAO type. One SAO LCU on/off flag for each color component is sent before the other syntax elements of the color component. In addition to the new SAO LCU on/off flag coding, constrained merge syntax is also proposed where a merge-left flag is not coded and inferred as zero when the left LCU is SAO-off. Results reportedly show 0.0%/0.3%/0.3%/0.5% luma coding gains for Main-AI/RA/LB/LP, respectively.

SAO on/off is now becoming dependent from SAO on/off of other LCUs (which is not the case currently).

Dependency/interference with other candidate adoptions (e.g. common usage of merge)

Two contexts (instead of one) are used for SAO on/off.

Merge left flag is becoming dependent from SAO on/off (whereas currently SAO on/off is dependent on merge left).

The amount of text changes is not trivial.

Several concerns raised – no action.

JCTVC-J0450 AhG6: Cross-check for decoupling SAO LCU on/off from SAO type (JCTVC-J0103) [E. Alshina (Samsung)] [late]