Optimal block boundary pre/post-filtering for wavelet-based image and video compression

This paper presents a pre/post-filtering method to reduce the reconstruction errors near block boundaries in wavelet-based image and video compression. It can be used effectively to mitigate the tiling artifact in JPEG2000 and the jittering artifact in 3D wavelet-based video compression. In this method, a short prefilter is applied across the boundaries of image tiles or video frame groups before wavelet compression, and a post-filter is applied at the same place after wavelet reconstruction. The optimal pre/postfilter is obtained by formulating and solving the corresponding rate-distortion optimization problem. A low-complexity structure is then proposed to approximate the optimal solution. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated by both image and video coding examples.