IEEE Transactions on Communications, vol. 46, no. 6, pp. 732-734, June 1998

 

A Novel Approach for Reduction of Blocking Effects in Low-bit-rate Image Compression

Zhou Wang1, 2 and Dapeng Zhang1

1 Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

2 Dept. of Communication & Electronic Engineering, South China Univ. of Tech., Guangzhou, China

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Abstract: In this letter we propose a new approach for removing blocking artifacts in reconstructed block-encoded images. The key of the approach is using piecewise similarity within different parts of the image as a priori to give reasonable modifications to the block boundary pixels. This makes our approach different from traditional ones, which are often developed by applying some kinds of smoothing constraints on local regions. Experimental results show that our approach well achieves enhanced decoding for JPEG-decoded images both objectively and subjectively.

Index Terms: image coding; blocking effects reduction; low-bit-rate image compression; removing blocking artifacts; reconstructed block-encoded images; piecewise similarity; block boundary pixels; smoothing constraints; local regions; enhanced decoding; JPEG-decoded images