Flicker Compensation for archived film using a mixed segmentation/block-based nonlinear model

Abstract

A new nonlinear method for the compensation of temporal brightness variations (commonly referred to as flicker) in archived film sequences is presented. The proposed method1 is motivated by fundamental principles of photographic image registration and provides a substantial level of adaptation to temporal but also spatial variations of picture brightness. Our approach is driven by segmentation of input frames to regions of homogeneous brightness which are used to provide reliable measurements of flicker parameters. Additionally our scheme provides an efficient mechanism of temporal filtering which makes it suitable for the compensation of long duration film sequences while it addresses problems arising from scene motion using a motion-compensated greylevel 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.