1,919 research outputs found
Adaptive filtering techniques for acquisition noise and coding artifacts of digital pictures
The quality of digital pictures is often degraded by various processes (e.g, acquisition or capturing, compression, filtering process, transmission, etc). In digital image/video processing systems, random noise appearing in images is mainly generated during the capturing process; while the artifacts (or distortions) are generated in compression or filtering processes. This dissertation looks at digital image/video quality degradations with possible solution for post processing techniques for coding artifacts and acquisition noise reduction for images/videos. Three major issues associated with the image/video degradation are addressed in this work. The first issue is the temporal fluctuation artifact in digitally compressed videos. In the state-of-art video coding standard, H.264/AVC, temporal fluctuations are noticeable between intra picture frames or between an intra picture frame and neighbouring inter picture frames. To resolve this problem, a novel robust statistical temporal filtering technique is proposed. It utilises a re-descending robust statistical model with outlier rejection feature to reduce the temporal fluctuations while preserving picture details and motion sharpness. PSNR and sum of square difference (SSD) show improvement of proposed filters over other benchmark filters. Even for videos contain high motion, the proposed temporal filter shows good performances in fluctuation reduction and motion clarity preservation compared with other baseline temporal filters. The second issue concerns both the spatial and temporal artifacts (e.g, blocking, ringing, and temporal fluctuation artifacts) appearing in compressed video. To address this issue, a novel joint spatial and temporal filtering framework is constructed for artifacts reduction. Both the spatial and the temporal filters employ a re-descending robust statistical model (RRSM) in the filtering processes. The robust statistical spatial filter (RSSF) reduces spatial blocking and ringing artifacts whilst the robust statistical temporal filter (RSTF) suppresses the temporal fluctuations. Performance evaluations demonstrate that the proposed joint spatio-temporal filter is superior to H.264 loop filter in terms of spatial and temporal artifacts reduction and motion clarity preservation. The third issue is random noise, commonly modeled as mixed Gaussian and impulse noise (MGIN), which appears in image/video acquisition process. An effective method to estimate MGIN is through a robust estimator, median absolute deviation normalized (MADN). The MADN estimator is used to separate the MGIN model into impulse and additive Gaussian noise portion. Based on this estimation, the proposed filtering process is composed of a modified median filter for impulse noise reduction, and a DCT transform based denoising filter for additive Gaussian noise reduction. However, this DCT based denoising filter produces temporal fluctuations for videos. To solve this problem, a temporal filter is added to the filtering process. Therefore, another joint spatio-temporal filtering scheme is built to achieve the best visual quality of denoised videos. Extensive experiments show that the proposed joint spatio-temporal filtering scheme outperforms other benchmark filters in noise and distortions suppression
A Fusion Approach for Multi-Frame Optical Flow Estimation
To date, top-performing optical flow estimation methods only take pairs of
consecutive frames into account. While elegant and appealing, the idea of using
more than two frames has not yet produced state-of-the-art results. We present
a simple, yet effective fusion approach for multi-frame optical flow that
benefits from longer-term temporal cues. Our method first warps the optical
flow from previous frames to the current, thereby yielding multiple plausible
estimates. It then fuses the complementary information carried by these
estimates into a new optical flow field. At the time of writing, our method
ranks first among published results in the MPI Sintel and KITTI 2015
benchmarks. Our models will be available on https://github.com/NVlabs/PWC-Net.Comment: Work accepted at IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer
Vision (WACV 2019
Fast and Accurate Depth Estimation from Sparse Light Fields
We present a fast and accurate method for dense depth reconstruction from
sparsely sampled light fields obtained using a synchronized camera array. In
our method, the source images are over-segmented into non-overlapping compact
superpixels that are used as basic data units for depth estimation and
refinement. Superpixel representation provides a desirable reduction in the
computational cost while preserving the image geometry with respect to the
object contours. Each superpixel is modeled as a plane in the image space,
allowing depth values to vary smoothly within the superpixel area. Initial
depth maps, which are obtained by plane sweeping, are iteratively refined by
propagating good correspondences within an image. To ensure the fast
convergence of the iterative optimization process, we employ a highly parallel
propagation scheme that operates on all the superpixels of all the images at
once, making full use of the parallel graphics hardware. A few optimization
iterations of the energy function incorporating superpixel-wise smoothness and
geometric consistency constraints allows to recover depth with high accuracy in
textured and textureless regions as well as areas with occlusions, producing
dense globally consistent depth maps. We demonstrate that while the depth
reconstruction takes about a second per full high-definition view, the accuracy
of the obtained depth maps is comparable with the state-of-the-art results.Comment: 15 pages, 15 figure
- …