Deblocking Joint Photographic Experts Group Compressed Images via Self-learning Sparse Representation

JPEG is one of the most widely used image compression method, but it causes annoying blocking artifacts at low bit-rates. Sparse representation is an efficient technique which can solve many inverse problems in image processing applications such as denoising and deblocking. In this paper, a post-processing method is proposed for reducing JPEG blocking effects via sparse representation. In this method, a dictionary is learned via the single input blocky image using K-SVD. There is no need for any prior knowledge about the blocking artifacts. Experimental results on various images demonstrate that the proposed post-processing method can efficiently alleviate the blocking effects at low bit-rates and outperforms the existing methods.