JVET-AE0013 JVET AHG report: Film grain technologies (AHG13) [W. Husak, M. Radosavljević (co-chairs), A. Duenas, D. Grois, Y. He, P. de Lagrange, X. Meng, A. Segall, A. Tourapis, W. Zhang (vice-chairs)]
Discussion
Much of this AHG period, ISO/IEC 23002-9 CDTR was out for comment. The document was issued on May 15. The expected response date was July 9 – just before the 31st Meeting (Geneva). The editors met on a roughly biweekly cadence throughout the period.
The discussions were related to content for film grain, external activities on film grain technologies and additional software being developed for film grain. There are several companies that are independently exploring content. The content is expected to be used for demonstrations and tests. The following characteristics were enumerated for further study:
- video representative of what could be found on streaming platforms
- 10 or 15s length
- consistent grain / no scene cut if possible
- perhaps cross-fades?
- balanced scene lighting (not everything dark or bright)
- decent resolution and video quality, so that video quality can be rated
- reasonable motion (not too fast, not too blurry, not fully still)
- reasonable spatial content (not empty sky, not packed with excessive texture)
- "normal" grain (not just blurry blobs or blocks, or just scratches)
- color / BW?
The group agreed the content should include a “ground truth”. However, it was recognized that the “de-noising” process could be controversial. Several content repositories were identified that could be a source of open-source content. In addition, some companies are exploring providing content they own and can assign the rights.
Two applications SDOs have opened or are exploring study items/missions on film grain. 3GPP has started a study item that is scheduled to be completed at the end of 2023. DVB is also exploring opening a study mission on film grain. There is also an expectation that other SDOs will follow suit and explore film grain. The group discussed potential support for those groups.
There were two industry demonstrations with film grain during the AHG period. The first was at Mile High Video 2003 (MHV2003) and the second was at DVB World. The second supported the launch and discussion of the DVB study mission.
Finally, several additional software packages were discussed. Several software packages were updated and some new features were added, such as an autoregressive parameter translator.
Related contributions
Three contribution related to AHG13 was identified as of 07/10/2023.
- The one contribution was the AHG report:
- JVET-AE0013 JVET AHG report: Film grain technologies (AHG13)
- Two other contributions were added but at present without an abstract
- JVET-AE0250 Film Grain Synthesis: Material Selection for Ground Truth Content Creation
- JVET-AE0251 Evaluating Denoising methods in the context of Film Grain Analysis/Synthesis
Contributions
There were no contributions uploaded as of the report time other than the AHG report.
Recommendations
The AHG recommended that:
- the related input contributions are reviewed;
- testing of FGC be discussed; and
- continue the study of film grain technologies in JVET.
It was pointed out that the software packages mentioned could be useful in the visual assessment activity.
BoG (W. Husak) to develop the DoCR (ballot response in m63723), and define which changes will be made in draft 5 relative to draft 4 (draft 5 will also be submitted as WG 5 DTR).
Potential viewing regarding the aspects of JVET-AE0250 and JVET-AE0251.