A gradient-based optimization approach for reduction of blocking artifacts in JPEG images

This paper presents a gradient-based optimization approach to achieve reduction of blocking artifacts in compressed JPEG images. This approach involves decomposing a JPEG image into 1-D signals once along the rows or columns and once along the columns or rows. The reduction of blocking artifacts is carried out per 1-D signal by an optimization formulation where the gradient of an original 1-D signal is approximated based on the gradient of a compressed signal. A fixed-weight and an adaptive-weight optimization formulation are considered and solved analytically. A restored image is reconstructed by aggregating recovered 1-D signals. The performance of the developed method is assessed by examining both gray-level and color images and by computing the three measures of PSNR, SSIM, and GBIM. Comparison results with five existing methods are also reported.     

A locally adaptive algorithm for measuring blocking artifacts in images and videos

Block transform coding is the most popular approach for image and video compression. The objective measurement of blocking artifacts plays an important role in the design, optimization, and assessment of image and video coding systems. This paper presents a new algorithm for measuring image quality of a BDCT coded images or videos. It exhibits unique and useful features: (1) it examines the blocks individually so that it can measure the severity of blocking artifacts locally; (2) it is a one-pass algorithm in the sense that the image needs to be accessed only once; (3) it takes into account the blocking artifacts for high bit rate images and the flatness for the very low bit rate images; (4) the quality measure is well defined in the range of 0–10. Experiments on various still images and videos show that the new quality measure is very efficient in terms of computational complexity and memory usage, and can produce consistent blocking artifacts measurement.     

Wavelet weighted distortion measure for retinal images

The diagnostic features of retinal images undergo changes in the course of processing such as for storage, retrieval and transmission. The conventional mean square error and peak signal to noise ratio have limitations in quantifying these local distortions. In this work, a novel wavelet weighted distortion measure (WWDM) is proposed for accurate quantification of diagnostic information loss. The wavelet analysis of retinal image shows that the significant information of a retinal feature is captured by a few subbands. The new approach is based on assigning a weight to each of the subbands depending on its diagnostic significance. The proposed distortion measure is defined as the sum of wavelet weighted root of the normalized mean square error of subbands expressed in percentage. The experimental results show that WWDM performs better in capturing the distortion in retinal features, whereas for distortion in clinically nonsignificant regions, it gives a low value. The qualitative evaluation using Pearson linear correlation coefficient and Spearman rank order correlation coefficient is performed for different artifacts. The investigation shows better correlation values between WWDM and the subjective scores.     

Using edge direction information for measuring blocking artifacts of images

Block-based transform coding is the most popular approach for image and video compression. The objective measurement of blocking artifacts plays an important role in the design, optimization, and assessment of image and video coding systems. This paper presents a new algorithm for measuring blocking artifacts in images and videos. Instead of using the traditional pixel discontinuity along the block boundary, we use the edge directional information of the images. The new algorithm does not need the exact location of the block boundary thus is invariant to the displacement, rotation and scaling of the images. Experiments on various still images and videos show that the new blockiness measure is very efficient in terms of computational complexity and memory usage, and can produce blocking artifacts measurement consistent with subjective rating.     

Removing the blocking artifacts of block-based DCT compressed images

One of the major drawbacks of the block-based DCT compression methods is that they may result in visible artifacts at block boundaries due to coarse quantization of the coefficients. We propose an adaptive approach which performs blockiness reduction in both the DCT and spatial domains to reduce the block-to-block discontinuities. For smooth regions, our method takes advantage of the fact that the original pixel levels in the same block provide continuity and we use this property and the correlation between the neighboring blocks to reduce the discontinuity of the pixels across the boundaries. For texture and edge regions, we apply an edge-preserving smoothing filter. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm significantly reduces the blocking artifacts of still and video images as judged by both objective and subjective measures.     

Reduction of blocking effect in DCT-coded images based on a visual perception criterion

Blocking effect constitutes one of the main drawbacks of the actual DCT-based compression methods. We propose in this paper a new block reduction technique; it is based on a space-variant non-linear filtering operation of the blocking artifacts present in the image to be reconstructed. To account for the perceptual importance of the distortion, the amount of smoothing is adapted to the visibility of the blocking effect. A visibility parameter is computed for each artifact using the psychovisual properties of the human visual system (HVS). The postprocessing algorithm is in conformity with actual existing compression standards; it provides a way to greatly reduce the artifacts without degrading high-frequency information of the original image. First the proposed method is described and then experimental results are presented, showing the effectiveness of the correction.     

A new image quality assessment method to detect and measure strength of blocking artifacts

Block based transform coding is one of the most popular techniques for image and video compression. However it suffers from several visual quality degradation factors, most notably from blocking artifacts. The subjective picture quality degradation caused by blocking artifacts, in general, does not agree well with the popular objective quality measure such as PSNR.A new image quality assessment method that detects and measures strength of blocking artifacts for block based transform coded images is proposed. In order to characterize the blocking artifacts, we utilize two observations: if blocking artifacts occur on the block boundary, the pixel value changes abruptly across the boundary and the same pixel values usually span along the entire length of the boundary. The proposed method operates only on a single block boundary to detect blocking artifacts. When a boundary is classified as having blocking artifacts, corresponding blocking artifact strength is also computed. Average values of those blocking artifact strengths are converted into a single number representing the subjective image quality. Experiments on various JPEG compressed images with various bit rates demonstrated that the proposed blocking artifacts measuring value matches well with the subjective image quality judged by human observers.     

GridSAR: Grid strength and regularity for robust evaluation of blocking artifacts in JPEG images

Images are subject to blocking artifacts when they are compressed using the JPEG standard. Knowing the extent of blocking artifacts is thus necessary for such applications as automatic quality monitoring and restoration. The current blocking artifacts measures are based on a strong prior that the block boundaries are known in advance, which often does not hold in real-world applications. Therefore, their performances degrade significantly when block boundaries are misaligned. To address the problem, this paper presents a robust no-reference blocking artifacts evaluation metric for JPEG images based on grid strength and regularity (GridSAR). The underlying idea is to extract block grids from a JPEG image and quantify the grid image to evaluate the strength of blocking artifacts. To this end, a grid map of blocking artifacts is first extracted from the image in the spatial domain. Then the blocking artifacts of the image are evaluated by quantifying the strength and regularity of the grid image. Furthermore, in order to account for the varying sensitivities of human eyes to the blocking artifacts in smooth and textured areas, a masking function is also proposed. Experimental results on seven popular image quality databases demonstrate that GridSAR achieves the state-of-the-art performance, and is robust to block misalignments.     

一种基于无参考的块效应评价方法

针对基于离散余弦变换(DCT)变换的图像压缩后失真图像易产生块效应,提出了一种有效的块效应评价方法.首先依据JPEG图像每8×8图像块的灰度值特性把其失真程度分为严重、较严重、有轻微方块化效应和无方块化4类,统计每类图像块占整幅图像的比例,然后确立每类图像块与图像质量平均主观得分(MOS)之间的关系,利用统计的Regr...     

Quality measure of color images based on properties ofvision psychology and color distortion in MPEG-21

In this article, a new way to evaluate the quality of color images is proposed, in which the properties of human vision psychology, objective fidelity, edge information, and color distortion will be combined through utilizing 3-D matrix transform. There exists color redundancy and structural similarity between three different frames of a color image, the definition of vision properties will be measured by 3-D submatrix integration transform (SIT), in which three color components are integrated into one model and color redundancy can be exploited fully. The simulation results show that the measure index is very effective and objective in accord with vision properties.     

Postprocessing technique for blocking artifacts reduction in DCT domain

An effective post-processing technique is proposed to reduce the blocking artifacts in the block discrete cosine transform (BDCT)-coded images. Simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme outperforms conventional post-processing techniques in both PSNR and visual quality.     

Detection of blocking artifacts in compressed video

A novel algorithm for the detection of artifacts in compressed video is described. The algorithm does not require access to the original video and therefore can be very useful in situations where quality assessment needs to be carried out at the receiver end. The proposed method is insensitive to other common video artifacts such as blurring for similar levels of objective distortion. The use of fast transformations in the frequency domain makes the method attractive for real-time applications     

Tetrolet变换方块效应改善算法

针对Tetrolet 变换算法对图像去噪后存在方块效应的缺陷,文中对Tetrolet 变换算法进行了扩展和改进,并引入移位（Cycle Spinning）来有效消除Tetrolet 变换算法中的方块效应。仿真结果表明,所提出的算法不仅能有效去除噪声,而且可得到更高的峰值信噪比,提高了图像的主客观质量。去噪后图像保留了原始图像的边缘和细节等局部特征,较为平滑,且方块效应得到了一定的改善和抑制,因而该算法是有效可行的。     

A new method for distortion correction of electronic endoscope images

A new method to correct the barrel distortion of an electronic endoscope image is presented. A correction model assuming circularly symmetric distortion is introduced with the following model parameters: the center of distortion and the coefficients of polynomials representing the distortion correction in the radial direction. If the imaging system is distortion-free, straight lines in the object space should be imaged as straight lines. Based on this criterion, a distorted image of a standard pattern consisting of a grid of several straight lines is recorded, and the model parameters are then estimated as a basis for straightening distorted lines. This method has the advantage of not needing a careful placement of the standard pattern for calibration. Correction results are presented for the grid pattern chart to verify a sufficient degree of correction. Examples of distortion correction of real intestinal images and physicians' comments are also presented.     

A Bayesian approach for the estimation and transmission ofregularization parameters for reducing blocking artifacts

With block-based compression approaches for both still images and sequences of images annoying blocking artifacts are exhibited, primarily at high compression ratios. They are due to the independent processing (quantization) of the block transformed values of the intensity or the displaced frame difference. We propose the application of the hierarchical Bayesian paradigm to the reconstruction of block discrete cosine transform (BDCT) compressed images and the estimation of the required parameters. We derive expressions for the iterative evaluation of these parameters applying the evidence analysis within the hierarchical Bayesian paradigm. The proposed method allows for the combination of parameters estimated at the coder and decoder. The performance of the proposed algorithms is demonstrated experimentally.     

A joint source-channel distortion model for JPEG compressed images.

The need for efficient joint source-channel coding (JSCC) is growing as new multimedia services are introduced in commercial wireless communication systems. An important component of practical JSCC schemes is a distortion model that can predict the quality of compressed digital multimedia such as images and videos. The usual approach in the JSCC literature for quantifying the distortion due to quantization and channel errors is to estimate it for each image using the statistics of the image for a given signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). This is not an efficient approach in the design of real-time systems because of the computational complexity. A more useful and practical approach would be to design JSCC techniques that minimize average distortion for a large set of images based on some distortion model rather than carrying out per-image optimizations. However, models for estimating average distortion due to quantization and channel bit errors in a combined fashion for a large set of images are not available for practical image or video coding standards employing entropy coding and differential coding. This paper presents a statistical model for estimating the distortion introduced in progressive JPEG compressed images due to quantization and channel bit errors in a joint manner. Statistical modeling of important compression techniques such as Huffman coding, differential pulse-coding modulation, and run-length coding are included in the model. Examples show that the distortion in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) can be predicted within a 2-dB maximum error over a variety of compression ratios and bit-error rates. To illustrate the utility of the proposed model, we present an unequal power allocation scheme as a simple application of our model. Results show that it gives a PSNR gain of around 6.5 dB at low SNRs, as compared to equal power allocation.     

A zero-watermark algorithm for multiple images based on visual cryptography and image fusion

At present, it is difficult for the multiple images zero-watermark algorithm to protect all the images in the image set, and repeated operations will reduce the efficiency of the algorithm. To solve these issues, the proposed algorithm can design a reasonable copyright protection scheme according to the number of images in the image set to realize the protection of all images, and reduce the cost of time and storage. The gray-weighted average image fusion method is used to fuse multiple normalized standard images into one image. The LWT(Lifting the Wavelet Transform)-QR decomposition is applied to the effective area of the fusion image to obtain the robust feature image. Non-extended visual cryptography is used to enhance the security of the algorithm. A zero-watermark image is obtained by using the XOR manipulation for the feature image and the public shared image. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has good performance.     

A new distortion measure for motion estimation in motion-compensated hybrid video coding

In the video coding standards MPEG-x and H.26x, a motion-compensated prediction technique is used for enhancing the coding performance of bitrate reduction or peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) improvement. This technique takes advantage of the correlation between consecutive frames in the time domain, which is relatively higher than that between adjacent blocks in the spatial domain. In order to utilize the correlation between consecutive frames, the conventional video coding standards have used the motion estimation (ME) and compensation technique, where the Sum of the Absolute Differences (SAD) is usually used as the distortion measure. The ME estimates the reference block that could minimize the residual signal between the current and reference blocks. However, the SAD is not appropriate to the specific sequences that have global or local illumination changes. In addition, the high-resolution video sequences have higher spatial correlation than the low-resolution video sequences in general. Therefore, a new distortion measure that can consider spatial and temporal correlation simultaneously may be helpful to enhance the coding performance. The proposed distortion measure searches for a reference block that minimizes the motion-compensated residual signal when the DC-component is predicted. In our proposed algorithm, the maximum BD-rate improvement is up to 13.6% for illumination-changed video sequences, and the average BD-rate improvement is 6.6% for various high-resolution video sequences in the baseline profile.     

一种基于最小可察觉失真的立体图像质量客观评价方法

立体图像质量是评价立体视频系统性能的有效途径,而如何利用人类视觉特性对立体图像质量进行有效的评价是目前的研究难点。本文通过分析最小可察觉失真(JND,just noticeable distortion)视觉感知模型,并结合反映图像结构信息的奇异值矢量,提出了一种基于JND的立体图像质量客观评价方法。评价方法由图像质量评价和深度感知评价两部分组成,首先提取反映图像质量和深度感知的特征信息作为立体图像特征信息,然后根据立体图像的不同失真类型情况对其特征进行融合,通过支持向量回归(SVR,support vector Regression)预测得出立体图像质量的客观评价值。实验结果表明,采用本文提出的客观评价方法对立体数据测试库进行评价,在不同失真类型或混合失真评价结果中,Pearson线性相关系数(CC)值均在0.94以上,Spearman等级相关系数(SROCC)值均在0.92以上,符合人眼视觉特性,能够很好地预测人眼对立体图像的主观感知。     

Correction of distortion in endoscope images

Images formed with endoscopes suffer from a spatial distortion due to the wide-angle nature of the endoscope's objective lens. This change in the size of objects with position precludes quantitative measurement of the area of the objects, which is important in endoscopy for accurately measuring ulcer and lesion sizes over time. A method for correcting the distortion characteristic of endoscope images is presented. A polynomial correction formula was developed for the endoscope lens and validated by comparing quantitative test areas before and after the distortion correction. The distortion correction has been incorporated into a computer program that could readily be applied to electronic images obtained at endoscopy using a desk-top computer. The research presented here is a key step towards the quantitative determination of the area of regions of interest in endoscopy.