A NEW DEBLOCKING ALGORITHM BASED ON ADJUSTED CONTOURLET TRANSFORM

A new postprocessing method based on adjusted contourlet transform is introduced in this paper for suppressing blocking artifacts (BA) in block-based discrete cosine transform (BDCT) compressed images. To our best knowledge, this is the first time contourlet is applied to this field. By exploiting scale space edge detector (ss-edge detector), our algorithm can extract and protect blocking map (BM) and edge map (EM) in the compressed image respectively in the same time. By transforming the compressed image into adjusted contourlet domain, the adaptive thresholds are obtained according to BM. According to the adaptive thresholds, the contourlet coefficients in different subbands are filtered. Experimental results show that our deblocking algorithm achieves better performance than the other iterative and noniterative methods reported in the literature. 1