Returning Greatness to Film Grain: Introducing AV1-Compatible Film Grain Modeling for Existing HEVC-Based Video Codecs

Dan Grois, Alex Giladi, Thomas Guionnet, Thomas Burnichon, Nikolay Tverdokhleb, Mickael Raulet

Film grain is spatially random in nature, while its physical size can also vary. In addition, film grain is independent in a temporal domain, thereby making it inherently difficult to compress. Therefore, to improve a video coding gain, the film grain is removed prior to encoding, and then added back after decoding at the post-processing stage, as is currently implemented in the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) AV1 coding scheme. In this work, the AV1-compatible film grain modeling for the High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC)-based video codecs has been carried out to utilize the existing AV1 film grain post-processing support efficiently. This is done by providing estimated film grain parameters within the International Telecommunication Union-Telecommunication (ITU-T) Recommendation T.35 (ITU-T T.35) Supplemental Enhancement Information (SEI) message. According to extensive experimental results conducted on popular cinematic content, significant bitrate savings are achieved.

Print ISSN
Electronic ISSN
2160-2492
Published
2024-01
Content type
Original Research
Keywords
film grain, video compression, coding efficiency, hevc, aom, av1, h.265
DOI
10.5594/JMI.2024/JUNZ2729