Regularized dequantizer for MPEG

Based on regularization principles, we propose a new dequantization scheme for MPEG. The new approach drastically reduces blocking artifacts without smoothing the decoded image. Most discrete cosine transform (DCT) based video coding suffer from blocking artifacts where boundaries of 8×8 DCT blocks become visible on decoded images. The blocking artifacts become more prominent as the bit rate is lowered. In this paper, we present a new dequantization technique for discrete cosine transform (DCT) based encoding to sharply reduce the blocking artifacts. Our proposed dequantization scheme, through regularization, sharply reduces blocking artifacts in decoded images. The performance of the proposed algorithm will be evaluated against the standard MPEG decoding. The comparison will show visual improvements as well as numerical improvements in terms of the peak-signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and the blockiness measure (BM) to be defined.