A Flickering Reduction Scheme for Tone Mapped HDR Video
The current state-of-the-art Tone Mapping Operators (TMOs) yield acceptable results when applied to High Dynamic Range (HDR) images. However, if they are applied on HDR video sequences, they may cause visual artifacts such as visual noise, flickering, ghosting and brightness and color inconsistencies. Among these artifacts, visual noise and flickering are believed to be the most annoying ones for the viewers. In this work, we propose a novel, automated, real-time solution to address the flickering artifact. Our approach uses a statistical based approach to detect scene changes and distinguish them from other visual changes that cause a flickering effect. An adaptive temporal low pass filter is applied on the tone mapping curve to efficiently reduce flickering, while preserving the artistic intention of scene changes.