Efficient Image Deblocking Based on Postfiltering in Shifted Windows

We propose a simple yet effective deblocking method for JPEG compressed image through postfiltering in shifted windows (PSW) of image blocks. The MSE is compared between the original image block and the image blocks in shifted windows, so as to decide whether these altered blocks are used in the smoothing procedure. Our research indicates that there exists strong correlation between the optimal mean squared error threshold and the image quality factor Q, which is selected in the encoding end and can be computed from the quantization table embedded in the JPEG file. Also we use the standard deviation of each original block to adjust the threshold locally so as to avoid the over-smoothing of image details. With various image and bit-rate conditions, the processed image exhibits both great visual effect improvement and significant peak signal-to-noise ratio gain with fairly low computational complexity. Extensive experiments and comparison with other deblocking methods are conducted to justify the effectiveness of the proposed PSW method in both objective and subjective measures.