Jiménez Moreno, AmayaMartínez Enríquez, EduardoKumar, VinayDíaz de María, Fernando2015-07-172015-07-172014-11IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (2014). 16(7), 1863-1873.1520-9210https://hdl.handle.net/10016/21445Flicker 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.12application/pdfeng© 2014 IEEE.Flicker artifactFlicker reductionH.264/AVCLow-pass temporal filteringMotion-guided temporal filteringOn-the-fly filter strength controlStandard compliantresearch articleTelecomunicaciones10.1109/TMM.2014.2347257open access186371873IEEE transactions on multimedia16AR/0000015863