Film grain, integral to analogue cinema's aesthetic, challenges video distribution in low-bitrate scenarios, often compromising its authenticity due to compression constraints. AV1 film grain synthesis technology addresses this by separating and estimating film grain parameters during encoding, which are then used to reconstruct grain during decoding. However, the choice of film grain block size impacts the quality of reconstruction, with larger blocks potentially introducing noticeable repetitive noise. We propose a novel perceptual quality assessment method to detect and penalize these repetitive patterns. By leveraging the human visual system's masking effect, our method normalizes decoded frames and assesses local cosine similarities with the film grain template to identify and quantify noise patterns. Implemented in the frequency domain, it processes high-resolution videos efficiently (around 2 FPS for UHD frames). Subjective experiments with expert viewers confirm high correlations (SRCC = 0.853, PLCC = 0.856) between our method and human judgments, validating its effectiveness in preserving film grain authenticity.
Readers will learn about the overall framework of Auto-Regressive (AR) film grain synthesis technology. Readers will understand the significant influence of film grain block size parameter on the quality and cinematic look of the reconstructed film grains in AV1 codec. Readers will learn about our methodology for detection and penalization of AV1 film grain repetitive patterns. Readers will learn about our subjective experiment on quality assessment of AV1 film grain repetitive patterns, which further demonstrates the importance film grain block size parameter.