A wavelet transform with point-symmetric extension at tile boundaries

Abstract

This paper presents a low-complexity wavelet transform that utilizes point-symmetric extension at the image tile boundaries. The proposed approach is considered as an alternative to the well-known symmetric signal extension in dealing with the boundary artifacts that manifest when tiles of images are lossy compressed. The new solution developed for odd-length filters preserves the perfect reconstruction property of the filter banks and deals efficiently with blocking artifacts without requiring any post processing technique or additional information from the neighboring tiles. It is shown that point-symmetric extension at the tile boundaries does not need to be applied explicitly, but instead the equivalent boundary filters can be derived. The lifting-based implementation of the filters provides a very simple way of changing filter parameters at the boundaries that suits both hardware and software platforms.