Low-Bit-Rate VQ: A Projection Based Approach

In this paper, we present an image decompression scheme that emphasizes visual perception rather than objective signal integrity between the orginal and the reconstructed images. The decoding scheme is developed in the context of vector quantization (VQ). The technique includes a projection based image recovery algorithm as part of the decoding process. The quantized blocks are classified into edge and shade blocks. The edge blocks are filtered using optimized templates while the shade blocks are left unaltered. The method can be considered as a constrained smoothing of edges, which does not cause any degradation to the shade (background) regions in the decoded image. The result is a reconstruction that is subjectively better than a simple look-up table decoding.