Perception adaptive temporal TV-noise reduction using contour preserving prefilter techniques

The reduction of Gaussian noise is still an important task in video systems. For this purpose a spatio-temporal noise reduction scheme for interlaced video is presented. It consists mainly of a subband based temporal recursive filter which makes use of some special properties of the human visual system. This temporal system is supported by a preceding detail preserving spatial filter with low hardware expense, which consists of an image analysing highpass filter bank and an adaptive lowpass FIR-filter for noise reduction. Both the spatial and temporal noise reduction have been evaluated with a large amount of simulations which result in a very good objective and subjective efficiency. Furthermore the chain of both temporal and spatial noise reduction may even yield results which are better than the sum of pure spatial and temporal techniques.