Flicker reduction in intraframe codecs

Abstract

Videos coded with intraframe codecs show flicker. For wavelet codecs this flicker impairs the visual quality significantly which is a major problem. It is said to be intrinsic to intraframe wavelet codecs. This paper analyses why flicker artifacts happen. We will illustrate our findings refering to motion JPEG2000. We will present some statistics on the flicker location in the wavelet domain. Depending on the frequency-band flicker will be more or less significant. Based on our analysis a flicker filter is developed which employs interframe information. The amount of this interframe information is minimal: 2 bits per pixel often produce compelling results. The interframe information does not have to be stored. We have developed an encoder which makes use of this filter. Our encoder produces a fully compliant motion JPEG2000 codestream.