Correlation based universal image/video coding loss recovery

• A novel and universal coding artifact reduction method is introduced.
• The coding artifact reduction is viewed as coding loss recovery.
• The coding loss is recovered from the compressed signal.
• Experimental results on four codecs demonstrate the effectiveness.

Coding artifacts are annoying in highly compressed signals. Most of the existing artifact reduction methods are designed for one specific type of artifacts, codecs, and bitrates, which are complex and exclusive for one type of artifact reduction. Since both the compressed image/video and the coding error contain information of the original signal, they are highly correlated. Therefore, we try to recover some lost data based on the correlation between the compressed signal and the coding error, and introduce a novel and universal artifact reduction method. Firstly, according to the spatial correlation among pixels, a pixel-adaptive anisotropic filter is designed to reconstruct the distorted signal. Next, a globally optimal filter is designed to further recover the coding loss. Experimental results demonstrate that within an extensive range of bitrates, the proposed method achieves about 0.8 dB, 0.45 dB, 0.3 dB, and 0.2 dB on average of PSNR improvement for JPEG, MPEG4, H.264/AVC, and HEVC compressed signals, respectively.