A Post-processing Technique for the Improvement of Color Blurring Using Modulations of Chroma AC Coefficients in DCT-coded Images

In this paper, we propose a post-processing technique developed for the subjective improvement of color resolution in DCT-coded color images. The high frequency components caused by complex object parts are compressed and impaired through DCT-based image processing, so color distortions such as blurs in high saturated regions are observed. It's mainly due to the severe loss of color data as Cb and Cr. Generally, the activities of chroma elements in DCT domain correlate strongly with that of luminance as spatial frequency gets higher, and based on the relations between chroma and luma AC activities, we compensate destructed Cb, Cr coefficients using modifications from Y coefficients. Simulation results show that the proposed method enhances color resolution in high saturated region, and improves the visual quality.