Spatio-temporal attribute morphology filters for noise reduction in image sequences

In video compression image noise degrades the overall compression performance. Reducing the noise content can produce a more compressible sequence, ideally with minimal effect on the visual quality. This paper presents a new approach to noise reduction using sliding window spatio-temporal attribute morphology filters with both area and power attributes. A combined spatial and spatio-temporal algorithm is proposed that produces a better overall peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) performance than either spatial or spatio-temporal filtering individually. The compression benefits of such an approach are also demonstrated.