Efficient image/video deblocking via sparse representation

Blocking artifact, characterized by visually noticeable changes in pixel values along block boundaries, is a common problem in block-based image/video compression, especially at low bitrate coding. Various post-processing techniques have been proposed to reduce blocking artifacts, but they usually introduce excessive blurring or ringing effects. This paper proposes a self-learning-based image/video deblocking framework via properly formulating deblocking as an MCA (morphological component analysis)-based image decomposition problem via sparse representation. The proposed method first decomposes an image/video frame into the low-frequency and high-frequency parts by applying BM3D (block-matching and 3D filtering) algorithm. The high-frequency part is then decomposed into a 'blocking component' and a 'non-blocking component' by performing dictionary learning and sparse coding based on MCA. As a result, the blocking component can be removed from the image/video frame successfully while preserving most original image/video details. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm.