Abstract: The present invention relates to an apparatus and method of a real-time, monitoring and control feedback system for a 2-D spectrometer application, to correct for active optical axis pointing misalignments or jitter (i.e., tip, tilt), that result in degraded scientific image integrity, unwanted spatial crosstalk and image blurring artifacts which severely limit the applications for high resolution spectrometer image data. The present invention provides a unique system architecture which ensures the most direct optical axis motion detection and control capability that will enable sub-pixel image motion monitoring and boresight control stability, thus, maximizing the science image quality.

Abstract: Frequency-based, pixel-adaptive filtering using the JPEG-ESAP algorithm for low bit rate JPEG formatted color images may allow for more compressed images while maintaining equivalent quality at a smaller file size or bitrate. For RGB, an image is decomposed into three color bands—red, green, and blue. The JPEG-ESAP algorithm is then applied to each band (e.g., once for red, once for green, and once for blue) and the output of each application of the algorithm is rebuilt as a single color image. The ESAP algorithm may be repeatedly applied to MPEG-2 video frames to reduce their bit rate by a factor of 2 or 3, while maintaining equivalent video quality, both perceptually, and objectively, as recorded in the computed PSNR values.

Abstract: Frequency-based, pixel-adaptive filtering using the JPEG-ESAP algorithm for low bit rate JPEG formatted color images may allow for more compressed images while maintaining equivalent quality at a smaller file size or bitrate. For RGB, an image is decomposed into three color bands—red, green, and blue. The JPEG-ESAP algorithm is then applied to each band (e.g., once for red, once for green, and once for blue) and the output of each application of the algorithm is rebuilt as a single color image. The ESAP algorithm may be repeatedly applied to MPEG-2 video frames to reduce their bit rate by a factor of 2 or 3, while maintaining equivalent video quality, both perceptually, and objectively, as recorded in the computed PSNR values.

Abstract: The invention presents The Estimated Spectrum Adaptive Postfilter (ESAP) and the Iterative Prepost Filter (IPF) algorithms. These algorithms model a number of image-adaptive post-filtering and pre-post filtering methods. They are designed to minimize Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) blocking distortion caused when images are highly compressed with the Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEG) standard. The ESAP and the IPF techniques of the present invention minimize the mean square error (MSE) to improve the objective and subjective quality of low-bit-rate JPEG gray-scale images while simultaneously enhancing perceptual visual quality with respect to baseline JPEG images.