Method and apparatus for reducing noise during lossy transformation processes

The present invention relates to the preprocessing of digital information, for example video information, prior to subjecting the digital information to a lossy transformation process such as a data compression process. Processing digital information made up of a plurality of n-bit samples is performed by raising each n-bit value to an x-bit value, x being greater than n. The x-bit values represent mid-band values, wherein in this context a band includes a sequential set of x-bit values having n most significant bits in common and a mid-band value is then an x-bit value approximately centered between the lowest and highest x-bit values of a band including that mid-band value. In some embodiments, the digital information may comprise video information. Thus, the process may be applied prior to converting the video information from a first color space (e.g., a red-green-blue (R-G-B) color space) to a second color space (e.g., a luminance-chrominance (Y-Cr-Cb) color space). For a particular embodiment, n may be equal to five or six, and x may be equal to eight, however, in general n may be variable amongst different ones of the samples.