Postprocessing of JPEG-2000 images to remove compression artifacts

Motivated by error concealment applications, this letter proposes a method for the postprocessing of JPEG-2000 compressed images at very low bitrates. The proposed method counter-intuitively employs further compression to achieve image enhancement. This approach, although not widely known, is not entirely new: it is an adaptation of a technique originally designed for the removal of block-transform coding artifacts. The contribution of this work is to demonstrate its applicability to wavelet coders. In its simplest form, this algorithm uses existing system components with little or no additional hardware or software. Experimental results show a distinct reduction of ringing artifacts at very low bitrates.