Efficient quantization noise reduction device for subband image coding schemes

This paper addresses the problem of the quantization noise reduction in subband image coding schemes. Two major artifacts occur for such coding schemes at high compression factors: the ringing effect around high-contrast contours and the blurred false contours in large smooth regions. The first distortion can be considerably reduced by an appropriate design of the subband filters. The second one can be eliminated by using the noise reduction technique proposed in this paper, which consists of applying a noise reduction filter to the DC subband. The advantages of this approach are as follows: first, it can be applied to any kind of subband decompositions; second, it removes quantization noise to which the eye is most sensitive; and third, it is computationally very efficient due to the small size (typically 64×64) of the DC subband. The colored quantization noise in the DC subband is rendered white by using the Roberts pseudonoise technique. The proposed noise reduction filter is a Wiener type filter with adaptive directional support. It has the advantage of reducing the noise without blurring the reconstructed image. It is shown that the proposed noise reduction filter augments the visual quality of the reconstructed image as well as its PSNR value