Fast compression artifact reduction technique based on nonlinear filtering

A computationally efficient postprocessing technique to reduce compression artifacts in low-bit-rate video coding is presented in this research. Blocking and ringing effects are two major compression artifacts observed in the block DCT-based video codec, such as H.263, when the coding bit rate becomes low. Reduction of these artifacts can significantly improve the overall visual quality of decoded video. A new table-lookup method and a nonlinear filtering approach are adopted to remove the blocking and ringing effects, respectively. Experiments employing H.263+TMN8 anchor bit-streams are performed to show that the proposed postprocessing technique can alleviate the coding artifacts efficiently with a low computational complexity