Grain Reduction in Scanned Image Sequences under Time Constraints

Abstract: This thesis is about improving the image quality of image sequences scanned by the film scanner GoldenEye. Film grain is often seen as an artistic effect in film sequences but scanned images can be more grainy or noisy than the intention. To remove the grain and noise as well as sharpen the images a few known image enhancement methods have been implemented, tested and evaluated. An own idea of a thresholding method using the dyadic wavelet transform has also been tested. As benchmark has MATLAB been used but one method has also been implemented in C/C++. Some of the methods works satisfactory when it comes to the image result but none of the methods works satisfactory when it comes to time consumption. To solve that a few speed up ideas are suggested in the end of the thesis. A method to correct the color of the sequences has also been suggested.