Compression artifacts reduction for MPEG-2 video utilizing total variation regularization method on CELL processor

In this paper, we propose an effective image compression noise reduction system based on the total variation (TV) regularization method. Our system allows the removal of MPEG-2 compression noise such as mosquito noise and blocky noise without losing picture sharpness. This method is particularly useful for HDTV terrestrial broadcasting with insufficient transmission bandwidth for noise-free HDTV pictures. The problem of the TV regularization method application to motion pictures is its high computational time requirement. We solved this problem by using the multi-core CELL processor. The experimental results show that the processing time of our system on the CELL processor is 2.5 ms, which is much lower than the television frame time of 16.7 ms. This shows that our system can be implemented in HDTV receivers.