Blocky artifact removal with low-rank matrix recovery

In this paper, a novel image blocky artifact removal scheme based on low-rank matrix recovery is proposed. The problem of suppressing blocky artifacts is formulated as recovering a low-rank matrix from corrupted observations. During the deblocking processing, we do not directly recover the whole clean image but only its high-frequency component and then synthesize the clean image by incorporating the low-frequency component of blocky image. To take advantage of the low-rank matrix recovery paradigm, we first cluster the similar patches of the high-frequency component of image via local pixel clustering, then the clean high-frequency component of image is recovered by formulating an optimization problem of the nuclear norm and ℓ₁-norm. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve competitive performance in terms of both quantitative and subjective quality.