Fractal Enhancement of Decompressed Images

Fractal image compression successfully uses selfsimilarity within an image to achieve compression. By adapting fractal image compression techniques to image enhancement, an innovative new fractal technique for visual enhancement of JPEG compressed images is created. After detecting the self-similarity characteristics of a degraded JPEG image, details spoiled by quantization are enhanced using an iterative scheme and the fractal nature of the method allows resolution enhancement and fractal zooming. The effect of the scheme is an increase in the visual quality of edges in the image for almost all areas and sharp results when the image resolution is increased. This application of fractal theory to the problem of image enhancement reveals a number of interesting avenues of investigation and promises techniques which can be used in combination with conventional methods, exploiting both self-similarity and statistical properties to achieve enhancement.