Image sequences noise reduction: an optical flow based approach

Abstract

We present an optical flow based method for noise reduction in image sequences. To prevent artefacts caused by optical flow imperfections, we propose a method to estimate these imperfections. We use the estimation to adaptively choose either a temporal or a spatial based noise reduction algorithm to be applied in different image zones. Our results have shown that an important noise reduction can be achieved with the proposed method, without the drawbacks of the simpler methods. The method has provided important noise reductions even with complex image sequences.