A deblocking algorithm for JPEG compressed images using overcomplete wavelet representations

This paper introduces a new approach to deblocking of JPEG compressed images using overcomplete wavelet representations. By exploiting cross-scale correlations among wavelet coefficients, edge information in the JPEG compressed images is extracted and protected, while blocky noise in the smooth background regions is smoothed out in the wavelet domain. Compared with the iterative methods reported in the literature, our simple wavelet-based method has much lower computational complexity, yet it is capable of achieving the same peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) improvement as the best iterative method and giving visually very pleasing images as well.