A simple and effective algorithm for false contour reduction in digital television

False contours are visually unpleasant stage-like edges within areas which are supposed to be smooth. Smoothing of these false contours usually results in losing some small magnitude details. In this paper, we present a false contour reduction algorithm and its hardware design for digital televisions. Although the hardware design has a limitation of two line memory, the proposed method performs reasonably well in reducing the false contour and preserving small magnitude details. Experimental results show that the proposed method has better performance.