Reducing Blocking Artifacts in Compressed Images

Transform coding is one of the most popular image compression techniques. However in these transformations, the image is divided into sub-blocks and each block in transformed individually. This introduces boundaries called blocking artifacts along the edges of these blocks. In this paper, we have discussed a spatial filtering method for reducing the blocking artifacts in transformed images. We have proposed a new algorithm on spatial filtering method that gives a better performance in reducing these artifacts. We then discuss a DCT based method and compare its performance with the spatial filtering methods. All the methods have been simulated and their results and matlab codes have been presented.