• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.47 no.2
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• pp.11-19
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• 2010

Most of deblocking filters assumes that the block boundaries are accurately known and the coding information like quantization parameters are available. In some applications such as commercial television, however, many external video inputs without known block boundary and coding information arc given. If a decompressed video sequence heavily degraded with blocking artifacts is given through the external video port, it is absolutely necessary to detect block boundaries and control the strength of deblocking filtering by analysing the given images. This paper presents an efficient method to find the block boundaries and estimate the strength of the blocking artifacts without the knowledge of coding information. In addition, the confidence of the estimated blocking artifact information is also evaluated to control the adaptive deblocking filter robustly. Experiment results show that the estimated block boundary locations and strength relative strength and confidence information are practically good enough to reduce the blocking artifacts without prior knowledge.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.30 no.3C
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• pp.158-166
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• 2005

Even though post-processing methods based on projections onto convex sets (POCS) have shown good performance for blocking artifact reduction, it is infeasible to implement POCS for real-time practical applications. This paper proposes DCT domain post-processing method based on POCS. The proposed method shows very similar performance compared to the conventional POCS method, while it reduces tremendously the computational complexity. DCT domain POCS performs the lowpass filtering in the DCT domain, and it removes the inverse DCT and forward DCT modules. Through the investigation of lowpass filtering in the iterative POCS method, we define kth order lowpass filtering which is equivalent to the lowpass filtering in the kth iteration, and the corresponding kth order DCT domain POCS. Simulation results show that the kth order DCT domain POCS without iteration gives very similar performance compared to the conventional POCS with k iterations, while it requires much less computations. Hence the proposed DCT domain POCS method can be used efficiently in the practical post-processing applications with real-time constraints.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.296-306
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• 2006

We proposed the algorithm for the quantization noise reduction based on variable filter adaptive to edge signal in MPEG postprocessing system. In our algorithm, edge map and local modulus maxima in the decoded images are obtained by using 2D Mallat wavelet tilter. And then, blocking artifacts in inter-block are reduced by Gaussian LPF that is variable to filtering region according to edge map. Ringing artifacts in intra-block are reduced by 2D SAF according to local modulus maxima. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm was superior to the conventional algorithms as regards PSNR, which was improved by 0.04-0.20 dB, and the subjective image quality.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.45-55
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• 1997

In this paper, we propose a fast algorithm with adaptive thresholding for the wavelet transform (WT) based blocking artifact reduction. In the fast algorithm, all processings that are equivalent to the processing in WT domain of the first and second scale are performed in spatial domain. In the adaptive thresholding, the threshold values used to classify the block boundary are selected adaptively according to each input image by using the statistical properties of the WT of the coded signal at block boundary and at block center, which can be obtained in spatial domain. Experimental results showed that the proposed fast algorithm is about 10 times faster than the WT-based algorithm. It also was found that the postprocessing with proposed adaptive thresholding yields some PSNR improvement and better subjective quality over that with nonadaptive thresholding which has best performance at high compression ratios of a certain .image, even at low compression ratios.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.22-27
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• 2014

Blocking and ringing artifacts continue to be the most serious defects that occur in images and video streams compressed to low bit rates using block-based discrete cosine transform(DCT) compression standards. These artifacts contain the high frequency components near the block and the edge boundaries. Usually the lowpass filter can remove them. However, simple lowpass filter results into blur by removing important information such as edges at the same time. To overcome these problems, we propose a novel postfiltering algorithm that calculate the weight value based on the intensity similarity in the neighboring pixels and multiply this weight to the Gaussian lowpass filter coefficient. Experimental results show that the proposed technique provides satisfactory performance in both objective and subjective image quality.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.42 no.6
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• pp.121-132
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• 2005

In the formation of images in a camera, the exposure time is appropriately adjusted to obtain a good image. Hence for a successful alignment of a sequence of images to the same scene, it is required to compensate the different exposure times. If we have no knowledge regarding the exposure time, then we should develop an algorithm that can compensate an image with respect to a reference image without using any camera formation models. In this paper, an exposure compensation is performed by designing predictors based on the conditional expectation between the reference and input images. Further, an adaptive predictor design is conducted to manage the irregular exposure or histogram problem. In order to alleviate the blocking artifact and the overfitting problems in the adaptive scheme, a smoothing technique, which uses the pixels of the adjacent blocks, is proposed. We successfully conducted the exposure compensation using real images obtained from digital cameras and the transmission electron microscopy.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.7 no.10
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• pp.1378-1388
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• 2004

This paper proposes method to improve the image quality degradation that show when reconstructing compressed images at low bit rate by using wavelet transform. The image quality distortion is blocking artifacts and noise in DCT's compression but blocking artifacts of wavelet transform does not appear and ringing artifacts was appeared near the edge. This proposed technique is classified to part which is ringing artifacts of the edge vicinity appears which is not, apply adaptive filter to each region improved image. A edge region which is harsh to the eye is applied by Canny mask and finding strong edge region, search the neighborhood classify the flat region and the texture region, and apply to each region suitable filter, As experiment result, PSNR value of method that is proposed in that low bit rate compression image that ringing artifact appears became low about 0.05db, but 0.023db degree rose strong edge region and nat region's image. Also, showed picture quality improved more than ringing artifacts in nat region when see from subjective viewpoint of human.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.33 no.8C
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• pp.583-590
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• 2008

In this paper, we present a spatially adaptive post-processing algorithm for H.264 video coding standard to remove blocking artifacts. The loop filter of H.264 increases computational complexity of the encoder. Furthermore it doesn't clearly remove the blocking artifacts, resulting in over-blurring. For overcoming them, we combine the projection method with the Constraint Least Squares(CLS) method to restore the high quality image. To reflect the Human Visual System, we adopt the weight norm CLS method. Particularly pixel location-based local variance and laplacian operator are newly defined for the CLS method. In addition, the fact that correlation among adjoining pixels is high is utilized to constrain the solution space when the projection method is applied. Quantization Index(QP) of H.264 is also used to control the degree of smoothness. The simulation results show that the proposed post-processing filter works better than the loop filter of H.264 and converges more quickly than the CLS method.

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.129-142
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• 2016

In Wyner-Ziv coding, video signals are reconstructed by correcting side information generated by block-based motion estimation/compensation at the decoder. The correction is not always accurate due to the limited number of parity bits and early stopping of low-density parity check accumulate (LDPCA) decoding in distributed video coding, or due to the limited number of measurements in distributed compressive video sensing. The blocking artifacts caused by block-based processing are usually conspicuous in smooth areas and degrade the perceptual quality of the reconstructed video. Conventional deblocking filters try to remove the artifacts by treating both sides of the block boundary equally; however, coding errors generated by block-based processing are not necessarily the same on both sides of the block boundaries. Such a block-wise difference is exploited in this paper to improve deblocking for Wyner-Ziv frameworks by designing a filter where the deblocking strength at each block can be non-identical, depending on the reliability of the reconstructed pixels. Test results show that the proposed filter not only improves subjective quality by reducing the coding artifacts considerably, but also gains rate distortion performance.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.639-642
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• 2005

In this paper, we assessed the subjective and objective quality of the images on low bit-rate which used the H.264 intra coding and JPEG2000. The result of our experiments shown the subjective and objective quality assessment of the intra coded image of H.264 high profile is better than JPEG2000. But, the blocking artifact is obvious because of the big difference of DCT and wavelet transform and quantization. it will be necessary to propose a new transform algorithm for the optimal quality.