Coding artifacts removal using biased anisotropic diffusion

Abstract

Biased anisotropic diffusion is applied to the coding artifacts removal of the DCT based codec. It is formulated as a cost minimization problem. The weighting factors of the cost function are controlled such that the solution removes the blocking effect and conceals the block losses. It has an advantage over other postprocessing schemes because it handles the discontinuity of the image, smoothes the image selectively, and takes the visual masking in to account. Features needed for the weighting factors are extracted directly from the DCT coefficients to reduce the computational complexity.