Fast POCS based post-processing technique for HDTV

In this paper, we present a novel postprocessing technique based on the theory of the projection onto convex sets (POCS) in order to reduce the blocking artifacts in digital high definition television (HDTV) images. By detecting and eliminating the undesired high-frequency components, mainly caused by blocking artifacts, we propose a new smoothness constraint set (SCS) and its projection operator in the DCT domain. In addition, we propose an improved quantization constraint set (QCS) using the correlation of DCT coefficients between adjacent blocks. In the proposed technique, the range of the QCS is efficiently reduced as close to the original DCT coefficient as possible to yield better performance of the projection onto the QCS. Computer simulation results indicate that the proposed schemes perform better than conventional algorithms. Furthermore, we introduce a fast implementation method of the proposed algorithm. The conventional POCS-based postprocessing techniques require the forward/inverse discrete cosine transform (DCT/IDCT) operations with a heavy computational burden. To reduce the computational complexity we introduce a fast implementation method of the proposed algorithm that does not perform DCT/IDCT operations. Estimates of computation savings vary between 41% and 64% depending on the task.