Bicriteria Block Splitting Heuristic For Lossy Compression

A method for partitioning a block of an image to reduce quantization artifacts includes estimating an expected entropy of the block; partitioning the block into sub-blocks, where each sub-block having a size of a smallest possible partition size; calculating respective amounts of visual masking for the sub-blocks; selecting, as a visual masking characteristic of the block, a highest visual masking value of the respective amounts of visual masking for the sub-blocks; combining the visual masking characteristic of the block and the expected entropy of the block to obtain a splitting indicator value; and determining whether to split the block based on the splitting indicator.The changes to the abstract are shown below:A method for partitioning a block of an image to reduce quantization artifacts includes estimating an expected entropy of the block; partitioning the block into sub-blocks, where each sub-block having a size of a smallest possible partition size; calculating respective amounts of visual masking for the sub-blocks; selecting, as a visual masking characteristic of the block, a highest visual masking value of the respective amounts of visual masking for the sub-blocks; combining the visual masking characteristic of the block and the expected entropy of the block to obtain a splitting indicator value; and determining whether to split the block based on the splitting indicator.