• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.13 no.12
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• pp.38-47
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• 2013

An image coding based on MRC model, a kind of multi-layer image model, first segments a screen image into foreground, mask, and background layers, and then compresses each layer using a codec that is suitable to the layer. The mask layer defines the position of foreground regions such as textual and graphical contents. The colour signal of the foreground (background) region is saved in the foreground (background) layer. The mask layer which contains the segmentation result of foreground and background regions is of importance since its accuracy directly affects the overall coding performance of the codec. This paper proposes a new layer segmentation algorithm for the MRC based image coding. The proposed method extracts text pixels from the background using morphological top hat filtering. The application of white or black top hat transformation to local blocks is controlled by the information of relative brightness of text compared to the background. In the proposed method, the boundary information of text that is extracted from the edge map of the block is used for the robust decision on the relative brightness of text. Simulation results show that the proposed method is superior to the conventional methods.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.48 no.5
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• pp.84-95
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• 2011

In this paper, we present a deblocking algorithm that removes grid and staircase noises, which are called "blocking artifacts", occurred in the compressed satellite images. Particularly, the given satellite images are compressed with equal quantization coefficients in row according to region complexity, and more complicated regions are compressed more. However, this approach has a problem that relatively less complicated regions within the same row of complicated regions have blocking artifacts. Removing these artifacts with a general deblocking algorithm can blur complex and undesired regions as well. Additionally, the general filter lacks in preserving the curved edges. Therefore, the proposed algorithm presents an adaptive filtering scheme for removing blocking artifacts while preserving the image details including curved edges using the given quantization step size and content analysis. Particularly, WLFPCA (weighted lowpass filter using principle component analysis) is employed to reduce the artifacts around edges. Experimental results showed that the proposed method outperforms SA-DCT in terms of subjective image quality.