FILM GRAIN REMOVAL USING METADATA

Film grain has been shown as an effective way to improve the look of video in terms of aesthetic feeling and sharpness. For backward compatibility, a strategy is to inject the film grain before video compression at encoder to ensure that any decoder can acquire the film grain injected images after video decompression. Moreover, for designed decoder, the film grain can be removed, and further video processing can be applied, such as adding other type of film grain or adaptive film grain setting according to the viewing environment. Therefore, in this work, we propose a metadata-aided film grain removal system such that the film grain can be removed efficiently using metadata in video bitstream. We propose three filtering methods (Gaussian, optimal FIR, and guided filter) in the proposed system. Experimental results show that the proposed system can remove film grain effectively and yield high PSNR.