Design of Optimal Decimation and Interpolation Filters for Low Bit-Rate Image Coding

The DCT-based JPEG standard is certainly one of the most successful applications of transform coding methods for still digital images. A commonly recognized disadvantage of the DCT-based transform coding is its blocking artifacts which become increasingly visible when the bit-rate gets lower. In the past, considerable research endeavors had been made to deal with this problem. Motivated by a recent work of Tsaig, Elad, Milanfar, and Golub (TEMG), in this paper we investigate several techniques for the design of optimal decimation and interpolation filters that can be utilized in a TEMG type system framework for further performance improvement, where the DCT-based JPEG standard is used in conjunction with a decimation filter and an interpolation filter. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques