ARTIFACT CHARACTERIZATION OF JPEG DOCUMENTS

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of blocking artifact characterization that is introduced when using low bit-rate JPEG compression. Specifically, a novel blocking metric is presented to characterize the distortion of JPEG blocking artifact when applied to document content. Furthermore, the proposed metric is directly processed in the transform domain without the need of fully decompressing the images, making its computation very time-efficient. Correlation of the proposed metric to OCR performance is validated through our experiments.