Patent ID: 8908984

Claim:
A method of enabling an image-adaptive, perceptually-lossless and near-maximal image compression, including: compressing a first image giving rise to a second image; implementing a measure of added artifactual edges along coding block boundaries, including: computing a difference image between the first and second images; defining a plurality of regions within said difference image, each of said plurality of regions comprising a plurality of image blocks; within said region, computing for each boundary between two coding blocks a respective added-blockiness score indicating an extent of added artifactual edges along the respective boundary; computing a region quality score for each of said plurality of regions, based on the added-blockiness scores computed for each boundary within the region, giving rise to a respective plurality of region quality scores; and computing an image quality score for the second image based on one or more of said plurality of region quality scores; and determining, based at least upon said image quality score, whether a perceptual quality criterion is met by said second image.