Image Deringing using Quadtree Based Block-shift Filtering

Guangtao Zhai , Jianfei Cai , Weisi Lin , Xiaokang Yang and Wenjun Zhang
Institute

of Image Communication and Information Processing Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China School of Computer Engineering Nanyang Technological University, 639798, Singapore

AbstractIn this paper, we propose an efcient spatial domain deringing algorithm using quadtree (QT) decomposition and block-shift ltering (BSF). The ringing artifacts are located through the QT decomposition of an image down to the 4 4 block size. The blocks with suspicious ringing are then replaced with the weighted average of itself and pixel-by-pixel shifted neighboring blocks. The block shifting range is up to 9 9 and only those shifted blocks resembling the center one are involved in the averaging stage. Experimental results show that the proposed deringing algorithm can effectively suppress the ringing artifact while preserving image edges and textures well, and the method substantially outperforms most of the existing deringing algorithms reported in the literature, both subjectively and objectively. Index TermsPostltering, quadtree decomposition, image deringing

I. I NTRODUCTION Ringing artifact is a kind of Gibbs phenomenon that occurs at low bitrates for lossy compression methods based on wavelet [1] or some subband transforms with long basis, e.g. LOT and GenLOT [2] [3]. Ringing is caused by heavy truncation on transform coefcients and can also come from improper image restoration operations [4]. The ringing artifact encountered in the new image coding standard JPEG2000 is much more difcult to model and / or suppress than the blockiness artifact in the last generation block-DCT based coding standard (JPEG). Among the deringing algorithms, the postltering schemes are often preferable due to their compatibility with existing coding standards. Shen and Kuo [5] formulated deringing into a classical maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation problem using a Markov random eld (MRF) model, and further proposed a non-iterative nonlinear lter to approximate the global optimum solution. Oguz et al. [6] proposed to use combined binary and grayscale morphological operations to lter out ringing artifact. Fan and Cham [7] designed an edge model under the framework of multiscale edge analysis and used it to reconstruct the corrupted edges in low bitrate wavelet coded image. Nosratinia [8] re-applied JPEG2000
This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (60332030, 60502034, 60625103), Shanghai Rising-Star Program (05QMX1435), Hi-Tech Research and Development Program of China 863 (2006AA01Z124), NCET-06-0409, and the 111 Project.

compression on a redundant representation of pixel-by-pixel shifted images and nally integrated the shift-backs to generate the postltered image. Yang et al. [9] employed a maximum likelihood estimation approach together with a k-means algorithm and a cluster-segmentation processing to suppress ringing artifact. Recently, Tan and Wu [10] designed a vision model for postltering JPEG2000 coded color images, with considerations of both inter and intra band masking effects. This postltering algorithm, however, is designed for a specic codec designed by the authors themselves, and this somewhat restricted its usage. Chen et al. [11] applied grayscale morphological operation together with a voting stage to choose an optimal postltering for deringing JPEG2000 images on the encoder side. Consequently this algorithm needs extra bitrate overhead of the morphological lter details to be transmitted to the decoder, and thus is not compatible with the existing standards. Li [12] introduced a POCS based decoding process exploiting both the quantization and geometric constraints to suppress the ringing artifact. An efcient spatial-variant non-iterative BSF algorithm was rstly proposed in [13] for deblocking, which can effectively eliminate blockiness while preserves image details well. In this paper, we explore BSFs ability of deringing low bitrate JPEG2000 images. A quadtree (QT) decomposition is adopted to locate the image blocks where ringing artifact tends to reside. The BSF is then applied on these ringing blocks to suppress the artifact. Since the ltering is only conducted on those ringing blocks, the computational complexity of the algorithm is greatly saved. Compared with the state-of-the-art deringing algorithms, our proposed algorithm achieves better visual quality yet with low complexity. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: the idea of QT guided BSF for deringing is presented in Section II. The simulations and comparison results are shown in Section III. The concluding remark is drawn in Section IV. II. Q UADTREE BASED B LOCK S HIFT F ILTERING A. Quadtree decomposition Quadtree decomposition can be performed in two ways: bottom-up and top-down. In bottom-up decomposition, an image is rst segmented into minimum size blocks, and then each group of four adjacent equal-size blocks is merged if the

978-1-4244-1684-4/08/$25.00 2008 IEEE

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Fig. 1.

An illustration of the block-shift ltering.

Fig. 2.

An illustration of the neighborhood of a block.

combined block is homogeneous. The entire process is iterated until no more block can be merged. On the other hand, in top-down decomposition, an image is rstly divided into four equal-size blocks, and then each of the newly generated blocks recursively splits into four new blocks if the original block is inhomogeneous and its size is larger than the minimum block size Smin . In general, in terms of processing speed, the topdown QT decomposition is superior for large size and smooth images while the bottom-up method performs better for small size and high texture images. In this research, we use the topdown QT decomposition and set Smin = 4 considering the fact that the 4 4 block can locate the ringing artifact well [11]. s1 s Let f(i,j) 2 denote an image block of size s1 s2 with its top-left corner at (i, j). We consider an image block is homogeneous if the variance of the block is less than a threshold, i.e.,
ss H[f(i,j) ] =

R , R+ , C , C + are the maximum shifting row/column indexes in the increasing/decreasing directions, respectively. Obviously, the shift ranges need to be carefully designed in order to achieve a good tradeoff between deblocking performance and processing speed. In the previous work [13] [14], the shifting range in each direction is typically chosen to be a value not larger than half of the central block size. In order to enclose the ringing oscillation area, in this paper, we set the shifting ranges to be the same as the block size, i.e. R = R+ = C = C + = 4. (2)

Next, we need to search for similar blocks within the determined shift ranges. We measure the block resemblance bess ss tween the central block f(i,j) and a neighbor block f(i+k,j+l) at the shifting position (k, l) as
ss ss R[f(i,j) , f(i+k,j+l) ] = s s ss ss 1 if 1 |f(i,j) (x, y) f(i+k,j+l) (x, y)| T hBR s2 x=1 y=1 0 otherwise,

1 0

ss if V ar[f(i,j) ] < T hQT , otherwise.

(1)

(3)

Clearly, larger T hQT will result in fewer 4 4 blocks in the QT decomposition, which reduces the computation complexity but at the cost of the deringing performance. In this research, we empirically nd that T hQT = 20 gives a good tradeoff between computation efciency and performance. Fig. 3(c) shows the QT decomposition result of the Peppers image coded by JPEG2000 at 0.1 bpp. It can be seen in Fig. 3(c) that the 4 4 blocks of the QT decomposition successfully cover up the ringing artifact regions. B. QT Based Block-shift Filtering As illustrated in Fig. 1, the basic idea of block-shift ltering is to shift an image block (called central block) within its neighborhood to search for similar blocks, and then all the identied similar blocks including itself are weighted to generate an output block. In particular, rst we need to determine the shifting ranges ss of a block, denoted as [f(i,j) ] = {R , R+ , C , C + }, where

where R k R+ , C l C + , and according to our experiment, we nd that T hBR = T hQT = 20 gives good result under most circumstances. ss Finally, for each central block f(i,j) , all its identied similar blocks including itself are weighted to generate an output block as ss f(i,j) =
(k,l)(i,j) ss w(k, l) f(i+k,j+l)

w(k, l)
(k,l)(i,j)

(4)

where (i,j) is the set containing all the similar blocks, and w(k, l) is to give the central block itself higher weight to prevent oversmoothing, i.e. w(k, l) = max{R , R+ , C , C + }2 1 if (k, l) = (0, 0) otherwise. (5)

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(a) Original peppers, 512 512.

(b) Peppers JPEG2000 compressed at 0.1bpp, (c) Quadtree decomposition, number of 4*4 blocks PSNR=29.41 dB. = 10064.

(d) The 4*4 block regions. Fig. 3.

(e) Number of resemblance neighbors, indicated by grayscale.

(f) The professing result, PSNR=29.84 dB.

Deringing results of 512 512 Peppers JPEG2000 coded 0.1 bpp. TABLE I PSNR C OMPARISON OF D ERINGING A LGORITHMS Images Bit Rate JPEG2000 Shen [5] Oguz [6] Nostratinia [8] Proposed 0.05 26.88 26.87 26.80 26.89 27.17 Lena 0.1 0.15 29.63 31.28 29.59 31.22 29.11 30.22 29.41 30.68 29.81 31.16 0.2 32.54 32.45 31.04 31.38 32.21 0.05 26.21 26.19 26.18 25.96 26.56 Peppers 0.1 0.15 29.42 31.02 29.37 30.95 29.17 30.49 28.37 29.32 29.84 31.13 0.2 32.00 31.91 31.28 29.72 31.97

Combining equations (1) to (5), we can have the processed image from QT-BSF based deringing. III. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS We used the Peppers image JPEG2000 compressed with Kakadu software [1] at 0.1 bit per pixel, which contains much visible ringing artifact around the peppers contours, as an example. The result of the proposed deringing algorithms is shown in Fig. 3. As can be observed, the ringing artifacts are successfully suppressed, and the edges are restored to be clear and crisp. The enlarged center parts of the image, with comparison to some existing deringing algorithms [5] [6] [8] are provided in Fig. 4. Through choosing proper potential function of the MRF, the nonlinear ltering [5] protects the

image edges well. However, it fails to smooth out the ringing artifact thoroughly, because the optimum approximation is limited to a neighborhood of pixel clique, which can not comprehensively cover the ringing area locally. The deringing lter in [6] achieves slight better ringing reduction result than [5], however, it is based on edge detection and complex morphological operations, which can be quite time-consuming and unstable. The compression re-application algorithm in [8] smoothes out most of the ringing artifacts, but the edges are also damaged. This is because there is not any edge discrimination process adopted in [8]. The PSNR results of these deringing algorithms on some more test images showing in Table I conrm that under most circumstances, the proposed block-shift deringing algorithm attains the best performance.

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(a) Original Peppers (part).

(b) JPEG2000 compressed at 0.1 bpp.

(c) Proposed Deringing algorithm.

(d) Nonlinear ltering [5] Fig. 4.

(e) Morphological ltering [6]

(f) Re-application of compression [8]

Visual comparison on deringing results of 512 512 Peppers JPEG2000 coded 0.1 bpp.

IV. C ONCLUSION In this paper, we have proposed an image deringing algorithm based on the quadtree (QT) decomposition and blockshift ltering (BSF). The image is rstly QT decomposed to the minimum block size of 4 4. Then the BSF is applied on these 4 4 blocks to suppress the possible ringing artifacts. The within-block variance is used for block uniformity measure, and the between-block mean absolute error is used for block resemblance measure. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithm can effectively eliminate the spurious oscillation around edges as well as protect the image details well. It also substantially outperforms most of the existing deringing algorithms, both subjectively and objectively. R EFERENCES
[1] D. Taubman and M. Marcellin, JPEG 2000: image compression fundamentals, standards and practices. Kluwer Academic Publisher, 2002. [2] H. S. Malvar and D. H. Staelin, The LOT: transform coding without blocking effects, IEEE Transactions on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 553559, Apr.1989. [3] R. L. de Queiroz, T. Q. Nguyen, and K. R. Rao, The GenLOT: generalized linear-phase lapped orthogonal transform, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, vol. 44, no. 3, pp. 497507, Mar.1996. [4] R. L. Lagendijk, J. Biemond, and D. E. Boekee, Regularized iterative image restoration with ringing reduction, IEEE Transactions on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, vol. 36, no. 12, pp. 18741888, 1988.

[5] M. Shen and C. C. J. Kuo, Artifact reduction in low bit rate wavelet coding with robust nonlinear ltering, IEEE Second Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing, pp. 480485, 1998. [6] S. H. Oguz, Y. H. Hu, and T. Q. Nguyen, Image coding ringing artifact reduction using morphological post-ltering, IEEE Second Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing, pp. 628633, 1998. [7] G. Fan and W. K. Cham, Model-based edge reconstruction for low bitrate wavelet-compressed images, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 120132, 2000. [8] A. Nosratinia, Postprocessing of jpeg-2000 images to remove compression artifacts, IEEE Signal Processing Letters, vol. 10, no. 10, pp. 296299, 2003. [9] S. Yang, Y. H. Hu, T. Q. Nguyen, and D. L. Tull, Maximum-likelihood parameter estimation for image ringing-artifact removal, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, vol. 11, no. 8, pp. 963973, 2001. [10] C. S. Tan and H. R. Wu, Vision model based perceptual post ltering of jpeg2000 coded colour images, in Proceedings of SPIE, vol. 5960, pp. 12351245, 2005. [11] Y. Y. Chen, S. C. Tai, C. X. Wang, and K. W. Lin, Design of a lter against artifacts for jpeg2000, Journal of Electronic Imaging, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 043 002112, 2005. [12] X.Li, Improved wavelet decoding via set theoretic estimation, IEEE Transaction on Circuits and System for Video Technology, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 108112, 2005. [13] G. Zhai, W. Zhang, X. Yang, W. Lin, and Y. Xu, Efcient image deblocking based on postltering in shifted windows, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, to appear, 2007. [14] T. Chen, H. R. Wu, and B. Qiu, Adaptive postltering of transform coefcients for the reduction of blocking artifacts, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, vol. 11, no. 5, pp. 594 602, 2001.

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