Localised deflicker of moving images

Abstract

Brightness fluctuations in sequences are a typical impairment in archive and modern footage. These fluctuations are mainly temporal but they may also present spatial variations across each individual frame. Current deflicker techniques consider that these variations are smooth but this paper shows that the flicker localisation can be very fine in some cases. This paper presents a deflicker algorithm that is able to handle within a same framework both very smooth spatial variations and very localised variations. The core of the method lies in the parametrisation of the flicker model with only one parameter per pixel. The viability of using such a fine parametrisation is made possible by employing a temporal filtering that effectively separates occlusions from the flicker estimation.