A new constraint for the regularized enhancement of compressed video

A novel fidelity constraint to the image enhancement problem is presented. With this constraint, we exploit the motion vectors of a compressed video bit-stream. These vectors establish a correspondence between image pixels across a series of frames, and we guarantee that processing the decoded sequence does not violate this correspondence. We develop the constraint within the context of MPEG-2 and incorporate the constraint into a regularized enhancement algorithm. Simulations are then performed. Quantitative and qualitative results illustrate an improvement in visual quality.