Color deflickering for high-speed video in the presence of artificial lighting

When acquiring high-speed video (more than 100 frames per second), artificial lighting can cause severe non-uniform luminosity and chroma variation between frames, commonly labeled periodic flicker. Non-uniform periodic flicker is not easy to correct in the presence of general motion, since its estimation requires background and object tracking, and most tracking techniques assume consistent illumination. In this paper, we propose a joint tracking/color correction scheme using a block matching technique paired with color variation estimation. We introduce a robust method for stabilizing brightness variations in image sequences. A post-processing step is also proposed in order to deal with blocking artifacts. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method both on simulated and real data.