Tiling artifact reduction for JPEG2000 image at low bit-rate

JPEG2000 is a very promising still image standard because of its excellent performance. However, it also causes a higher complexity to implement. In practice, in JPEG2000 coding systems, an image is segmented into serial tiles and each tile is compressed or transformed independently, thus creating tiling artifacts in the tile boundary. At low bit rates, tiling artifacts in JPEG2000 images are annoying. This paper introduced a new post-processing method to reduce this artifact, where max-lift wavelet subband decomposition was used and then subband coefficients were adaptively filtered and soft-thresholded. The post-processing is done out of JPEG2000 image coding systems, so it has no compatible problem with the JPEG2000 standard. Experiments showed that the post-processing was effective to obviously enhance the visual quality of the JPEG2000 image at low bit rates.