Spatial noise shaping based on human visual sensitivity and its application to image coding

A spatial noise shaping (SNS) method based on human visual sensitivity is presented. It effectively shapes (or say hides) the noise of an image in areas which are not sensitive to human visual perception so that the resulting image is more pleasant to human eyes. The noise comes from the processing of the image, and it can be either separable like the additive noise pattern in image watermarking or non-separable like the quantization noise in image coding. An application of the algorithm is also demonstrated by using it to enhance image coders. Images decoded from the SNS incorporated coders possess a superior quality to those which do not use SNS