Adaptive Fuzzy Filtering for Artifact Reduction in Compressed Images and Videos

In this paper, spatial neighboring pixels are used to deal with blocking and ringing artifacts while temporal neighboring pixels are utilized to remove mosquito and flickering artifacts. To avoid the blurring effect of linear filters, a fuzzy filter is implemented. Fuzzy filter is a specific case of bilateral filters [15], [16]. Fuzzy filters help denoising the artifacts while retaining the sharpness of real edges. In image and video compression, the artifacts such as blocking or ringing artifacts are spatially directional and flickering artifacts are temporally directional. For compressed video sequences, the motion compensated spatiotemporal filter (MCSTF) is applied to intraframe and interframe pixels to deal with both spatial and temporal artifacts. In this work, a novel fuzzy filter is proposed to adapt to the pixel's activity and directions between the pixel of interest and its surrounding pixels.