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Removing the blocking artifacts of block-based DCT compressed images.
1Gennum Corporation, Burlington, ON, Canada. yluo@gennum.com
Summary
This study introduces an adaptive method to reduce blocking artifacts in DCT compression. The technique enhances image and video quality by minimizing block boundary discontinuities in both DCT and spatial domains.
Area of Science:
- Digital Image Processing
- Signal Processing
- Computer Vision
Background:
- Block-based Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) compression methods often produce visible blocking artifacts at block boundaries.
- These artifacts arise from coarse quantization of DCT coefficients, leading to discontinuities between adjacent blocks.
Purpose of the Study:
- To propose an adaptive algorithm for reducing blocking artifacts in DCT compressed images and videos.
- To improve the visual quality of compressed images by addressing block-to-block discontinuities.
Main Methods:
- An adaptive approach is employed, operating in both the DCT and spatial domains.
- For smooth regions, the method leverages intra-block pixel continuity and inter-block correlation.
- For texture and edge regions, an edge-preserving smoothing filter is applied.
Main Results:
- The proposed algorithm effectively reduces blocking artifacts in both still and video images.
- Objective and subjective evaluations confirm significant improvements in image and video quality.
- The method successfully minimizes block-to-block discontinuities.
Conclusions:
- The adaptive DCT and spatial domain approach is effective in reducing blocking artifacts.
- This method offers a significant improvement over standard DCT compression techniques.
- The algorithm enhances the visual fidelity of compressed visual data.
