Enhanced film grain noise removal for high fidelity video coding

In this paper, we propose a novel technique for film grain noise removal, which can be adopted in high fidelity video coding. Film grain noise enhances the natural appearance of high fidelity video, therefore it is should be preserved. However, film grain noise is a burden to typical video compression systems because it has relatively large energy level in the high frequency region. In order to improve the coding performance while preserving film grain noise, the noise removal and synthesis process is used. We propose a film grain noise removal technology in the pre-processing step. In pre-processing step, film grain noise is removed by using temporal, spatial and inter-color correlation. Specially, color image denoisng using inter color prediction provides good denoising performance in noise concentrated B plane because film grain noise has inter-color correlation in the RGB domain. The results show that the coding gain of denoised video is higher than for previous works, while the visual quality of the final reconstructed video is well preserved.