Flicker stabilization in image sequences

Flicker is an artefact appearing in image sequences, which is characterized by intensity changes from a frame to another. Some of these contrast changes may be localized on a part of the image.

This page presents some experiments of local flicker stabilization. For each example, the flickering sequence is shown on the left and the stabilized sequence on the right. The local stabilization used here corresponds to the WM operator described in
J. Delon and A. Desolneux, Flicker stabilization in image sequences, preprint HAL, 2009.

Some sequences corrected globally and presented in the paper J. Delon, Movie and Video Scale-Time Equalization ; application to flicker reduction, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, vol.15, no 1, pp.241-248, Janvier 2006 are also available here.

Sequences from old movies

Four extracts from old movies, suffering from strong flicker effects. The first two sequences are extracts from Our Shrinking world (1946), available on the website www.archive.org. The results on these two sequences can be compared with the results of state of the art algorithms, kindly provided by Guillaume Forbin on his webpage.

• Boat
• Greatwall
• Les Aventures des Pieds Nickeles
• Hat sequence

Biological sequence

A biological sequence suffering from important flicker-like effects.

• Physarum sequence

Synthetic flicker

In these experiments, a synthetic multiplicative flicker has been added to the sequences. This flicker is either randomly located, or motion-coherent. In this last case, it consists in a multiplicative dark transparent strip moving from the top left to the bottom right of the frames.

• taxi sequence, random multiplicative flicker
• taxi sequence, motion-coherent flicker
• flag sequence, random multiplicative flicker
• flag sequence, motion-coherent flicker

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