Reduction of blocking effect in DCT-coded images using zero-masking techniques

It is well-known that the blocking effect is one of the major drawbacks in the DCT-based compression schemes (such as JPEG) at low bit rates. In this paper, we propose a novel technique to reduce blocking artifacts, which is based on applying a zero-masking to the DCT coefficients of some shifted im age data blocks. Some simulation results are presented to show that such a simple method can provide a respectable performance. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.