Blocking artifacts reduction using adaptive bilateral filtering

In this paper, we propose a simple, non iterative blocking artifacts reduction method for block discrete cosine transform (DCT) compressed images, using adaptive bilateral filter. Bilateral filter when applied on a input image, smooths out the blocking artifacts by weighted averaging of the pixel values without smoothing the edges. The proper selection of the bilateral filter parameters is very important and affects the filtering results significantly. We select the bilateral filter parameters optimally, through empirical study. The bilateral filter parameters are made adaptive to different decompressed images using different quantization tables. Our main contribution in this paper is to select the bilateral filter parameters optimally and adaptively through empirical study, in application to image deblocking. The proposed method shows highly encouraging results both objectively and subjectively, when compared to many state of the art image deblocking schemes including a recent method based on adaptive bilateral filter.