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.
@article{arxiv.2009.10804,
title = {Adaptive Debanding Filter},
author = {Zhengzhong Tu and Jessie Lin and Yilin Wang and Balu Adsumilli and Alan C. Bovik},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.10804},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
4 pages, 7 figures, 1 table. Accepted to IEEE Signal Processing Letters