Introduction

The intensity flicker is a very annoying artifact which can be perceived as abnormal variations of the local and global luminance values. Most of the common techniques need an uncorrupted frame to correct the sequence with respect to the reference one. Alternatively the common techniques apply a global correction (e.g. using histogram equalisation) which cannot reduce the local flicker. These approaches are not able to properly treat all of the real variations caused by the scene evolution.

Proposed solution

The proposed algorithm is able to effectively reduce the intensity flicker artifact and -at the same time- to preserve the details and the real evolution of the scene.

This approach estimates the temporal trend of the sequence and performs a local and a global correction: the main innovation, with respect to the known techniques, is that a reference frame is not required. This way the algorithm can follow the natural variations of the luminance and correct the wrong ones.

You can download an AVI file which contains a fragment of a real movie. The top image shows the original sequence while the bottom one shows the corrected one. Due to copyright reasons we cannot distribute the movie in original format, but the quality improvement obtained using the proposed algorithm is apparent.

NOTTE DI QUIETE about 3 MegaBytes