Analysis of the Effect of Motion Estimation Error on the Motion Adapive Spatial Filter and Its Application

Abstract

The motion adaptive spatial filter (MASF) is a kind of temporal filter proposed for noise reduction and temporal band limitation. The MASF uses motion vectors to extract temporal information in spatial domain. Therefore, inaccurate motion information causes some distortions in MASF operation. To decrease such distortions, a sophisticated motion estimation algorithm that can estimate motion with subpel resolution and afford to deal with sufficiently great motion is needed. Such algorithm, however, causes a large increment of the look-up table size required for the very large scale integration (VLSI) implementation of the MASF. To solve this problem, we analyze the effect of motion estimation error on the MASF and propose a postprocessing scheme for the estimated motion vectors. Experimental results show that by using the proposed scheme considerable amounts of distortions are eliminated without any increment of required look-up table size. (C) 1996 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers.