Blockiness reduction in JPEG coded images

A novel technique is proposed to reduce the blocking artifacts detected in the JPEG coded images, especially in low bit rates. The proposed algorithm is consisting of two stages: firstly, the AC coefficients are estimated based on their observed probability distribution and secondly, a postprocessing scheme consisting of a region classification algorithm and a spatial adaptive filtering is applied for blockiness removal. Experimental results illustrating the performance of the proposed method are presented and evaluated using the mean squared difference of slope (MSDS) metric.