Local MAP estimation for quality improvement of compressed color images

This paper concerns color image restoration aiming at objective quality improvement of compressed color images in general rather than merely artifact reduction. In compressed color images, colors are usually represented by luminance and chrominance components. Considering characteristics of human vision system, chrominance components are generally represented more coarsely than luminance component. To recover such chrominance components, we previously proposed a model-based chrominance restoration algorithm where color images are modeled by a Markov random field. This paper presents a color image restoration algorithm derived by the MAP estimation, where all components are totally estimated. Experimental results show that the proposed restoration algorithm is more effective than the previous one. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.