Reducing artifacts in coded images using a neural network aided adaptive FIR filter

Abstract Coding artifacts can greatly degrade the visual quality of the images. This paper presents a new postprocessor for image coding artifact removal. The basic idea is to smooth the artifacts using an adaptive FIR filter aided by neural networks. The specially designed and trained network provides adaptive filter coefficients based on local image properties with the ability to efficiently remove the coding artifacts while preserving image details. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed postprocessor on coding artifact removal and its efficiency in terms of providing a fast processing speed. The proposed method is promising for real-time video image processing due to the inherent parallelism of computations and hardware implementation of the neural network.

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