Differences between Smoothers and Soften Plugins

[arlsair]

Hi,
the smoothers and soften plugins are separated in the AviSynth FAQ.
Can anyone tell me if there is a difference in what they do. For me both blur/smooth/soften the video.

Or are they just separated in the FAQ, because the sharpen
plugins can also be used as smoothers ?

[Mug Funky]

it is probably because a blur/soften will not distinguish between "detail" and "noise", but simply blur everything.

blur filters make a good building block for a smoothing filter of your own devising though :)

[Didée]

Originally posted by Mug Funky
it is probably because a blur/soften will not distinguish between "detail" and "noise", but simply blur everything.
Now, the $1000 question:

Which are the filters that actually try to *reckognize* noise, and distinguish them from image detail?

*whistles a melody* :D

- Didée

[Malevolent]

@ Didée:

100% guess based on experience & 99% lack of real hard facts - i'd say:

Guavacomb
Dust (pixie,fairy,gold)
mf's HQdering

Can't think of any others atm, but i hope there are others (and that these were right ;))

[Mug Funky]

hehe.. that all depends on the filter's definition of noise.

my current favourite spatial smoother defines noise as "high frequencies of amplitude below a threshold", where the threshold is greyscale rather than binary.

it all depends what you want out of the filter... acceptable visual quality plus compressibility gain is the main reason to denoise, and the above definition does extremely well for it.

...but something tells me that i wont get $1000 for this :(

[mf]

Originally posted by Malevolent
mf's HQdering
HQDering does filter out noise, but it isn't meant to do that :). It simply goes by the principle that ringing (aka Gibbs phenomenon) profiles itself as irregularities concentrated around high frequencies (edges). So it uses a brute-force denoiser (deen) and applies it around edges.
You could see this as "recognizing" ringing, but any other irregularities around edges get smoothed out too. So is it really that? :D

It would probably be more of a real "HQDering" if you used BlindPP as smoother instead of Deen, because it is actually designed for ringing. I however don't like it, because it doesn't preserve sharpness as well as Deen does.