A PDE-based method for ringing artifact removal on grayscale and color JPEG2000 images

As successor to JPEG, JPEG2000 aims to realize a very low bitrate. Although JPEG2000´s rate distortion has been improved by approximately 30% against JPEG, as on most images compressed using overlapping transforms-based algorithms, one can notice visible spurious oscillations, or ringing artifacts, around the edges of a JPEG2000-compressed image. In this paper, we propose a partial differential equations, or PDE-based image enhancement technique, in order to remove these ringing artifacts, while keeping the image´s edges. Results are provided on grayscale and color images, showing a visible enhancement, confirmed by the PSNR increase.