Compression Artifacts Removal for VVC with Frequency Domain Mixture of Experts Network

In recent years, lossy compression algorithms such as H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, and H.266/VVC have been proposed and widely applied in image and video encoding. However, these compression algorithms inevitably introduce various complex types of compression artifacts, which severely degrade image quality. Although existing methods have attempted to remove artifacts through filter design or probabilistic prior modeling, they are often effective only for specific types of artifacts, lacking generalization and adaptability. To address this, we propose a novel image compression artifacts removal model: ARMoE, which combines multiple frequency domain transformations with the Mixture of Experts (MoE). Considering the frequency distribution and energy distribution differences of images, we introduce various frequency domain transformations as expert branches and use the Sparse Activation Strategy to adaptively select the optimal frequency domain expert to suppress compression artifacts, achieving an efficient artifacts removal method. Furthermore, we reencode and decode multiple original uncompressed high-quality datasets, including DF2K and Kodak24, using the VTM-20.0 codec under the H.266/VVC standard, constructing a more challenging artifacts dataset. We conducted rigorous comparative experiments with current state-of-the-art image restoration methods and the results demonstrate that ARMoE exhibits outstanding image restoration capability.