The block-based preprocessing system for the coding performance improvement

In general, most images get to contain unwanted noise in the process of image acquisition and such noise may deteriorate the performance of standard coding systems. Therefore, by pre-reducing inborn noise in images, the coding performance can be improved significantly. In order to improve the coding performance of the standard codecs, a new preprocessing system using spatially adaptive filtering is proposed. In this approach, the preprocessing system is implemented through block region classification and adaptive morphological filtering. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm obtains significant improvement for standard still and moving images as well as acquired noisy images, as compared with applying no preprocessing. The proposed system can be easily applied to the standard codecs such as JPEG, MPEG, etc., and significantly improve the quality of decoded images without increasing bit-rate.