Color Noise Reduction Method in Non-constant Luminance Signal for High Dynamic Range Video Service

Abstract

A high dynamic range (HDR) video service is an upcoming issue in the broadcasting industry. For compatibility with legacy devices receiving a non-constant luminance (NCL) signal, new tools supporting an HDR video service are required. The current pre-processing chain of HDR video can produce color noise owing to the chroma component down-sampling process for video encoding. Although a luma adjustment method has been proposed to solve this problem, some disadvantages still remain. In this paper, we present an adaptive color noise reduction method for an NCL signal of an HDR video service. The proposed method adjusts the luma component of an NCL signal adaptively according to the information of the luma component from a constant luminance signal and the level of color saturation. Experiment results show that the color noise problem is resolved by applying our proposed method. In addition, the speed of the pre-processing is increased more than two-fold compared to a previous method.