Fast and Efficient MRF-Based Detection Algorithm of Missing Data in Degraded Image Sequences

This paper proposes a fast, efficient detection algorithm of missing data (also referred to as blotches) based on Markov Random Field (MRF) models with less computational load and a lower false alarm rate than the existing MRF-based blotch detection algorithms. The proposed algorithm can reduce the computational load by applying fast block-matching motion estimation based on the diamond searching pattern and restricting the attention of the blotch detection process to only the candidate bloch areas. The problem of confusion of the blotches is frequently seen in the vicinity of a moving object due to poorly estimated motion vectors. To solve this problem, we incorporate a weighting function with respect to the pixels, which are accurately detected by our moving edge detector and inputed into the formulation. To solve the blotch detection problem formulated as a maximum a posteriori (MAP) problem, an iterated conditional modes (ICM) algorithm is used. The experimental results show that our proposed method results in fewer blotch detection errors than the conventional blotch detectors, and enables lower computational cost and the more efficient detecting performance when compared with existing MRF-based detectors. key words: blotches, MRF models, degraded image sequences, ICM method