Grain-Degrain Project

We developed new methods of removing and applying of the film grain (specific type of noise that is usually present in materials that were captured from film). Our methods allow extraction of film grain information from video and using it for applying of the grain that is very similar to original.
Some examples and explanation you can find below.

Results

Here are three examples of film grain from real video, it could be easily seen that film grain has another structure than digital noise. In most cases film grain makes video more natural and also masks some small artifacts:

Original frame from DA sequence
Frame from DA sequence (720x353)
Original frame from MI sequence
Frame from MI sequence (640x272)
Original frame from DTs sequence
Frame from DTs sequence (1920x1088)
Scaled part of frame from DA
Scaled part of frame from DA
Scaled part of frame from MI
Scaled part of frame from MI
Scaled part of frame from DTs
Scaled part of frame from DTs

We have developed several methods for film grain removal including temporal and spatial noise filtration; you can find few examples below:

Source fragment from DA
Source fragment from DA
Grain removal results
Grain removal results
Source fragment from MI
Source fragment from MI
Grain removal results
Grain removal results
Source fragment from DTs
Source fragment from DTs
Grain removal results
Grain removal results

We are proposing two types of grain parameters estimation:

And three types of grain generation:

An example of visual comparison for grain generation you can find below:

Source fragment from DA
Source fragment from DA
Regraining results
Regraining results
Source fragment from MI
Source fragment from MI
Grain removal results
Regraining results

We have obtained these results by original video de-graining, determining grain parameters and applying grain to the de-grained video. Structures of grain in the regrained frames look very similar to the original sources.

The following example shows how regraining technique helps to increase quality and makes compression artifacts significantly less noticeable:

Source fragment from DA
Source fragment from DA
Grain removal results
Regraining results

These methods provides possibility to add grain to any other video, making it more natural (for example adding grain to synthetic video). This also makes compressed video look better especially in case when original grain was corrupted by lossy video encoder.

Download

Please contact us if you are interested in a commercial license.

E-mail: video@graphics.cs.msu.ru

10 Mar 2011
See Also
Video Colorization Benchmark
Explore the best video colorization algorithms
MSU Video Group / Video data filtering and compession
VirtualDub MSU Logo Remover
The filter is intended to remove logo from films
MSU Stereo To Multiview 3D Video Conversion ( Glasses-free 3D-Displays Video Content creation)
Stereo to multiview video conversion algorithm for glasses-free autostereoscopic 3D displays
MSU Video Super-Resolution Filter
This filter increases resolution of video sequence while saving and improving details and reducing artifacts.
MSU Video Group / Video data filtering and compession
Site structure