Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: Banding artifacts, which manifest as staircase-like color bands on pictures or video frames, is a common distortion caused by compression of low-textured smooth regions. These false contours can be very noticeable even on high-quality videos, especially when displayed on high-definition screens. Yet, relatively little attention has been applied to this problem. Here we consider banding artifact removal as a visual enhancement problem, and accordingly, we solve it by applying a form of content-adaptive smoothing filtering followed by dithered quantization, as a post-processing module. The proposed debanding filter is able to adaptively smooth banded regions while preserving image edges and details, yielding perceptually enhanced gradient rendering with limited bit-depths. Experimental results show that our proposed debanding filter outperforms state-of-the-art false contour removing algorithms both visually and quantitatively.
Source: IEEE Signal Processing Letters
Institutions: The University of Texas at Austin, Google (United States)
Language: English
Topic: Image Enhancement Techniques
Subfield: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3088230179