Publication: Standard-Compliant Low-Pass Temporal Filter to Reduce the Perceived Flicker Artifact
Loading...
Identifiers
Publication date
2014-11
Defense date
Advisors
Tutors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
IEEE
Impact
Export
Abstract
Flicker is a common video-compression-related temporal artifact. It occurs when co-located regions of consecutive frames are not encoded in a consistent manner, especially when Intra frames are periodically inserted at low and medium bit rates. In this paper we propose a flicker reduction method which aims to make the luminance changes between pixels in the same area of consecutive frames less noticeable. To this end, a temporal low-pass filtering is proposed that smooths these luminance changes on a block-by-block basis. The proposed method has some advantages compared to another state-of-the-art methods. It has been designed to be compliant with conventional video coding standards, i.e., to generate a bitstream that is decodable by any standard decoder implementation. The filter strength is estimated on-the-fly to limit the PSNR loss and thus the appearance of a noticeable blurring effect. The proposed method has been implemented on the H. 264/AVC reference software and thoroughly assessed in comparison to a couple of state-of-the-art methods. The flicker reduction achieved by the proposed method (calculated using an objective measurement) is notably higher than that of compared methods: 18.78% versus 5.32% and 31.96% versus 8.34%, in exchange of some slight losses in terms of coding efficiency. In terms of subjective quality, the proposed method is perceived more than two times better than the compared methods.
Description
Keywords
Flicker artifact, Flicker reduction, H.264/AVC, Low-pass temporal filtering, Motion-guided temporal filtering, On-the-fly filter strength control, Standard compliant
Bibliographic citation
IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (2014). 16(7), 1863-1873.