Adaptive Debanding Filter
Open accessAbstract
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.
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- Authors
- Tu, Z., Lin, J., Wang, Y., Adsumilli, B., & Bovik, A. C.
- Affiliations
- The University of Texas at Austin (US)
- Google (United States) (US)
- Venue
- IEEE Signal Processing Letters
- Published
- 2020
- Volume
- 27
- Pages
- 1715-1719
- ISSN
- 1070-9908 (ISSN-L)
- 1558-2361
- OpenAlex
- W3088230179
- Cited by
- 31
- References
- 33
- Citations by year
- 2025: 9 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 5 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 6 · 2020: 3
- FWCI
- 1.65
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- arxiv.org
- Licence
- Locations
- IEEE Signal Processing Letters (publishedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Image Enhancement Techniques
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Image Processing Techniques
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Image and Video Quality Assessment
- Keywords
- false contouring, dithered quantization, video post-processing, edge preservation
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