Biased reconstruction for JPEG decoding

Assuming a Laplacian distribution, there exists a well known method for optimally biasing the reconstruction levels for the quantized ac discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients in the JPEG decoder. This, however, requires an estimate of the Laplacian distribution parameter. We derive a new, maximum likelihood estimate of the Laplacian parameter using only the quantized coefficients available at the decoder. We quantify the benefits of biased reconstruction through extensive simulations and demonstrate that such improvements are very close to the best possible resulting from centroid reconstruction.