Abstract
A new approach for the compensation of temporal brightness variations (commonly referred to as flicker) in archived film sequences is presented. The proposed method uses fundamental principles of photographic image registration to provide adaptation to temporal and spatial variations of picture brightness. The main novelty of this work is the use of spatial segmentation to identify regions of homogeneous brightness for which reliable estimation of flicker parameters can be obtained. Additionally our scheme incorporates an efficient mechanism for the compensation of long duration film sequences while it addresses problems arising from varying scene motion and illumination using a novel motion-compensated grey-level tracing approach. We present experimental evidence which suggests that our method offers high levels of performance and compares favourably with competing state-of-the-art techniques.
Highlights
Flicker refers to random temporal fluctuations in image intensity and is one of the most commonly encountered artefacts in archived film
The approach was based on non-linear modelling introduced in previous work and contains important novel components such as flicker estimation on homogeneous regions and temporal filtering using grey-level tracing. These novelties allows to address, respectively, the challenges posed by the spatial variability of flicker impairments and the adaptive estimation of flicker compensation profile for long duration sequences and scene motion
Our results demonstrate that the algorithm is very effective towards flicker compensation both in subjective and objective terms and compares favourably to state-of-art methods that feature in the literature
Summary
Flicker refers to random temporal fluctuations in image intensity and is one of the most commonly encountered artefacts in archived film. Inconsistent film exposure at the image acquisition stage is its main contributing cause. Film flicker is immediately recognisable even by nonexpert viewers as a signature artefact of old film sequences. Its perceptual impact can be significant as it interferes substantially with the viewing experience and has the potential of concealing essential details. It may lead to considerable discomfort and eye fatigue after prolonged viewing. Camera and scene motion can partly mask film flicker and as a consequence, the latter is much more noticeable in sequences consisting primarily of still frames or frames with low-motion content. In addition it must be pointed out that inconsistent intensity between successive frames reduces motion estimation accuracy and by consequence the efficiency of compression algorithms
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