An automatic method for unequal and omni-directional anisotropic diffusion filtering of video sequences

In this paper, we propose a method for automatic, unequal and omni-directional anisotropic diffusion filtering of video sequences. Our method, which consists of automatic foreground/background discrimination using the color characteristics of the human face and skin, unequal filtering of the determined regions and then composition of the filtered regions into the final frames, is applied prior to encoding the video sequences. In addition to yielding higher visual quality of the decoded sequences than that of the decoded sequences with equal filtering over the entire frame, our method is robust with respect to skin tone and lighting variations, has low complexity and requires no calibration. We illustrate the main advantages of our method using videoconferencing sequences.