A Human Vision System based Flash Picture Coding Method for Video Coding

Flash light due to photographing widely appears in video sequences especially in those obtained from news interviews, conferences and sports matches. When a flash picture is encoded, the intensity changes drastically and non-uniformly so that motion estimation can not find a well-matching block in reference pictures. Accordingly, much more bits are generated than the neighboring non-flash pictures. In this paper, a novel flash picture coding method which represents a new concept of video coding is proposed. Based on human vision system (HVS) property, rather than encoding the original flash picture, it encodes an artificial flash picture which is made up of an artificial non-flash (or de-flashed) picture and some parameters for flash effect modeling. Experiments show the proposed flash picture coding method greatly reduces the coded bits of the flash picture while still provides a competitive subjective quality.