Graphics and Media Lab

MSU Graphics & Media Lab (Video Group)

The filter is intended for processing video with flicker effect (fast and abrupt frame brightness changes). The effect of flicker is a common degradation in old movies. Typical example:

Sequence of frames from movie with flicker

So the filter is very useful for old movie cleaning task. The advantage is especially greater when non-stationary flickering is present (war chronicles). The filter is automatic having a scene change detection.

Examples

We will compare work of MSU Deflicker filter and Donald Graft's filter.

Let's take as an example the following old movie with World War II chronicles:

A frame from movie

Let's consider graphs of brightness change by frames.

average brightness of frame graphs

The graph for MSU Deflicker filter has same smoothness as graph of D.Graft's filter, but MSU Deflicker filter better corresponds to global brightness change along the movie.

Now let's consider work of the filter in case of frame brightness jump. We will take other old movie for testing.

The frame 18 of sequence	The frame 19 of sequence

You can compare results of filters below:

The frame 19 after MSU Deflicker filter	The frame 19 after Donald Graft's filter

Download

Filter for VirtualDub MSU Deflicker (31 KB,ZIP)
Unpack this file in the folder "Plugins" in VirtualDub directory to use.

See also

Detailed description of MSU Deflicker filter

The project team

Project lead:

• Dr. Dmitriy Vatolin

Researchers:

• Konstantin Strelnikov

Contacts

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