Objective evaluation of colour bleeding artefact due to image codecs

This paper presents extended research work done by the author in his approach to assess image codecs for compression artefacts using synthetic test patterns. Colour bleeding artefact is a visual distortion due to image compression process. Colour bleeding mainly results from the colour leakages across distinct colour boundaries. Quantisation of transformed colour components also contributes to the colour distortions. A synthetic test pattern which was designed previously to stress the codec under test is used to investigate the hue spread across each colour region [2]. The proposed metrics can be used to benchmark codecs and parameter optimisation of the processing engines of compression algorithms. The tests performed on the Irfanview JPEG codec and JPEG2000 codec demonstrated that JPEG2000 codec outperformed the JPEG codec with respect to colour reproduction for the version of Irfanview implementations tested.