Perceptual Quality Assessment of Film Grain Synthesis in AV1 and VVC (Master)
Film grain is a characteristic of video that was the result of the usage of analog film due to physical exposure and the development of photographic film. Such processes do not occur in digital sensors and hence videos are grain-free. However, for reasons such to have a natural appearance, provide a more cinematic look, etc. filmmakers introduce grain into digital content. However, the random nature of such added noise makes it challenging for the encoder to compress videos efficiently. For this, modern video encoders such as AV1 and VVC provide efficient strategies for sythesizing film grain along with efficient compression. This thesis will focus on the subjective and objective comparison of the film grain synthesis methods in two different encoders, namely, AV1 and VVC. The tasks would include
- Designing a subjective test(s) for the comparison of the film grain sythesis methods
- Conduction of the subjective test(s)
- Subjective test results analysis
- Benchmarking and analysis of the state-of-the-art instrumental video quality models
Relevant literature (non-exhaustive)
- Z. Ameur, F. Lefebvre, P. Delagrange and M. Radosavljević, "FGA-NN: Film Grain Analysis Neural Network," 2025 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), Anchorage, AK, USA, 2025, pp. 2103-2108, doi: 10.1109/ICIP55913.2025.11084309.
- A. Norkin and N. Birkbeck, "Film Grain Synthesis for AV1 Video Codec," 2018 Data Compression Conference, Snowbird, UT, USA, 2018, pp. 3-12, doi: 10.1109/DCC.2018.00008.
- Vignesh V. Menon, Adam Wieckowski, Jens Brandenburg, Benjamin Bross, Thomas Schierl, and Detlev Marpe. 2024. Gain of Grain: A Film Grain Handling Toolchain for VVC-based Open Implementations. In Proceedings of the 3rd Mile-High Video Conference (MHV '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 47–53. https://doi.org/10.1145/3638036.3640805
- Grois, D., Giladi, A., Guionnet, T., Burnichon, T., Tverdokhleb, N., & Raulet, M. (2024). Returning Greatness to Film Grain: Introducing AV1-Compatible Film Grain Modeling for Existing HEVC-Based Video Codecs. SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal, 133(1), 40-50., https://doi.org/10.5594/JMI.2024/JUNZ2729
- Menon, V. V., Wieckowski, A., Stoffers, C., Brandenburg, J., Lehmann, C., Bross, B., ... & Marpe, D. (2024). Enhancing Film Grain Coding in VVC: Improving Encoding Quality and Efficiency. arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.12465., https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2407.12465
Suitable for Master theses. Contact person: Dr.-Ing. Rakesh Rao Ramachandra Rao
