Blocking artifacts reduction in image compression with block boundary discontinuity criterion

This paper proposes a novel blocking artifacts reduction method based on the notion that the blocking artifacts are caused by 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 compensates for selected transform coefficients so that the resultant image has a minimum block boundary discontinuity. The proposed method does not require a particular transform domain where the compensation should take place; therefore, an appropriate transform domain can be selected at the user's discretion. In the experiments, the scheme is applied to DCT-based compressed images to show its performance.