Artifacts: False Contours Detection and Smoothing

Abstract

As a result of significant JPEG or MPEG loss compression and decompression some specific artifacts may turn up on an image, such as false contours or blocks of quadrates, they especially become ugly visible when the image is stretched on a bigger size of HDTVpanel. In the work these artifacts are detected, and their visual perception reduced by smoothing, while saving natural edges untouched. The task of detection is completed with general histogram analyzing and it's comparison with some local features on the image. Also a measure of false edge smoothing efficacy is suggested and demonstrated with different combination of smoothing methods.