Design of a Deblocking Filter for Both Objective and Subjective Metrics

Abstract

Blocking artifact is a major limitation of DCT-based codec at low bit rates. This degradation is likely to influence the judgment of a final user. This work presents a powerful post-processing filter in the DCT frequency domain. The proposed algorithm adopts a shift block within four adjacent DCT blocks to reduce computational complexity. The artifacts resulting from quantized and de-quantized process are eliminated by slightly modifying several DCT coefficients in the shift block. Simulation results indicate that the proposed method produces the best image quality in terms of both objective and subjective metrics.