Content-based image post-processing for blurring artifact reduction

Blurring artifacts occur in low bit-rate wavelet images or in video coding. They manifest themselves as blurred patches within textured regions. As such, it is possible to exploit this texture level correlation between adjacent image regions to reconstruct the lost texture. In order to automatically identify the blurred patches, and use valid source regions to draw textures from their surroundings regions, we developed an efficient content-based statistical testing method to choose the candidate source region and to identify potentially blurred patches. Preliminary experiment results indicate that our algorithm produces excellent results that are consistent with that produced by a human operator.