Content based blurring coding artifact reduction using patch-based texture synthesis [image/video coding applications]

Blurring artifacts occur in low bit-rate image or video coding. This manifests itself as a blurred patch within a textured region. Previously, we proposed a constrained texture synthesis postprocessing algorithm to regenerate the texture of the blurred patch using surrounding texture of the same kind. However, a human operator must manually identify the blurred target, and a valid source region from its surroundings. In this work, we present an effort to automate this process. Specifically, we developed an efficient modified k-means algorithm method to segment and identify potentially blurred patches; and a content-based region selection method to choose the candidate source region. Preliminary experiment results indicate that our algorithm produces results consistent with that produced by a human operator.