Adaptive Fuzzy Filtering for Artifact Reduction in Compressed Images and Videos

A fuzzy filter adaptive to both sample's activity and the relative position between samples is proposed to reduce the artifacts in compressed multidimensional signals. For JPEG images, the fuzzy spatial filter is based on the directional characteristics of ringing artifacts along the strong edges. For compressed video sequences, the motion compensated spatiotemporal filter (MCSTF) is applied to intraframe and interframe pixels to deal with both spatial and temporal artifacts. A new metric which considers the tracking characteristic of human eyes is proposed to evaluate the flickering artifacts. Simulations on compressed images and videos show improvement in artifact reduction of the proposed adaptive fuzzy filter over other conventional spatial or temporal filtering approaches.