Blocking artifacts reduction in image coding based on minimum block boundary discontinuity

This paper proposes a novel blocking artifacts reduction method which is based on the notion that the blocking artifacts are present in images due to heavy accuracy loss of transform coefficients in the quantization process. We define the block boundary discontinuity measure as the sum of the squared differences of pixel values along the block boundary. The proposed method makes correction of the selected transform coefficients so that the resultant image has minimum block boundary discontinuity. It does not specify a transform domain where the correction should take place, therefore an appropriate transform domain can be selected at user's discretion. In the experiments, the scheme is applied to DCT- based compressed images to show its performance.