Alternatives to FFT3DFilter for luma denoising on pictures?

[Chainmax]

As amazing as FFT3DFilter is for chroma denoising on pictures, I find the luma denoising to be lacking as it seems to cause artifacting. Can you recommend me something that works as nicely on luma only?

[moviefan]

I don't know, if this denoises only luma, but I have made very good experience with "Temporal Degrain" (http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/Temporal_Degrain). It gave me very pleasing results on semi-noisy sources. So give it a try, if you like.

[Dark Shikari]

dfttest?

[TheRyuu]

Originally Posted by Dark Shikari

dfttest?

that would be my first though.

[Chainmax]

It works better than FFT3DFilter, but not by that much. Noise Ninja still does better in that regard.

[cestfait]

did you try frfun7? frfun3d?

[*.mp4 guy]

tnlmeans(ax=8, ay=8, sx=16, sy=16, bx=1, by=1, sse=true, a=1, h=12)

h is the strength of denoising, 12 is very high, set it to the lowest levels that removes enough noise. It's a very very slow filter, but the results are better then anything else, given slow enough processing setings (the settings given are quite slow). its one of Triticals plugins.

[Didée]

Originally Posted by *.mp4 guy

It's a very very slow filter, but the results are better then anything else, given slow enough processing setings (the settings given are quite slow).

Oh yeah, TNLMeans ... one of the best unusable filters. Results after tweaking can be very good, but when using "good enough" settings, tweaking takes long, and encoding takes ages.

Feeding PAL 720x576: with the settings you posted, one frame takes me ~2 minutes to render (2.6 GHz singlecore). For a two hours movie, that would be ~250 days to encode. I'm tolerant against slow filtering, but too much is too much.
And when reducing the settings enough to get "competitive" speeds, the results are no more same.


@ Chainmax - didn't you forget to specify what material you're dealing with, what kind of noise there is, etc.? "Something that works as nice as FFT3DFilter" is a highly vague and nebulous question ...

[Chainmax]

cestfait: I will try those.

*.mp4 guy: I'll try that one as well. Since I'm only processing pictures, filter speed is not an issue at all.

Didée: you're right, my bad. I'll post comparative screenshots with all options mentioned so far as soon as I can.

Thanks for the suggestions so far, if you have more please keep them coming.

[*.mp4 guy]

Originally Posted by Didée

Oh yeah, TNLMeans ... one of the best unusable filters. Results after tweaking can be very good, but when using "good enough" settings, tweaking takes long, and encoding takes ages.

Feeding PAL 720x576: with the settings you posted, one frame takes me ~2 minutes to render (2.6 GHz singlecore). For a two hours movie, that would be ~250 days to encode. I'm tolerant against slow filtering, but too much is too much.
And when reducing the settings enough to get "competitive" speeds, the results are no more same.


@ Chainmax - didn't you forget to specify what material you're dealing with, what kind of noise there is, etc.? "Something that works as nice as FFT3DFilter" is a highly vague and nebulous question ...

doesn;t anyone read the thread title.

"Alternatives to FFT3DFilter for luma denoising on pictures?"

That means 1-speed is not important, and 2-no temporal processing; combined that means tnlmeans is the most optimal (can't say best) performing filter for removing uncorrelated noise irregardless of other factors.

[R3Z]

Originally Posted by *.mp4 guy

doesn;t anyone read the thread title.

"Alternatives to FFT3DFilter for luma denoising on pictures?"

That means 1-speed is not important, and 2-no temporal processing; combined that means tnlmeans is the most optimal (can't say best) performing filter for removing uncorrelated noise irregardless of other factors.

If 720x576 takes 2 minutes for one frame, then god help anyone trying a normal digital camera resolution

[*.mp4 guy]

A 1024*768 picture only takes ~1 minute on my computer, and I don't have the fastest machine around by any stretch o the imagination, iirc Didée said he has a prertty dated machine in another thread.

[thetoof]

For very bad sources with a LOT of luma noise, I use fft3dfilter with specified noise pattern (sigma2/3/4) and plane=0 to create a reference clip for Temporal Degrain and it gives better results than fft3d alone and even dfttest for some sources.

I'll post some screenshots when I get back home.

[Terranigma]

Originally Posted by thetoof

and even dfttest for some sources.

I'll post some screenshots when I get back home.

And when you compare dfttest, please use tbsize=5 and not 1, along with sbsize 16, and sosize to 8 with U and V set to false. That will make things about even.

[Socio]

Originally Posted by *.mp4 guy

tnlmeans(ax=8, ay=8, sx=16, sy=16, bx=1, by=1, sse=true, a=1, h=12)

h is the strength of denoising, 12 is very high, set it to the lowest levels that removes enough noise. It's a very very slow filter, but the results are better then anything else, given slow enough processing setings (the settings given are quite slow). its one of Triticals plugins.

Just for fun I tried it with a dual 3.06 processor rig using MT at a setting h=2 for light denoising and it took about 60 seconds to render a single frame. Granted the results are phenomenal but slow is a understatement.

[cestfait]

Originally Posted by Socio

Just for fun I tried it with a dual 3.06 processor rig using MT at a setting h=2 for light denoising and it took about 60 seconds to render a single frame. Granted the results are phenomenal but slow is a understatement.

What was the resolution of the image?

[Socio]

Originally Posted by cestfait

What was the resolution of the image?

720X480

[cestfait]

wow. that's a long time.

i just read the paper that tritical links to on his website about this method of denoising, however, and TNL Means looks pretty unbeatable as of now. It makes fourier-weiner (a la fft3d) look pretty weak disregarding time....

[thetoof]

I said before that I would post screenshots... here they are!

Original

For all the filters (except TemporalDegrain), I added FFT3DFilter(sigma=10, plane=3, bw=32, bh=32, bt=5, ow=16, oh=16) before luma denoise to ensure that all the chroma noise was removed.

The settings that Terranigma suggested gave me blocking artifacts and, even after increasing the overlap to 12, my settings below gave better results. Stronger sigma screwed up the image.
dfttest(sigma=7,smode=0,sbsize=5,tbsize=5,u=false,v=false)

I'd never used tnlmeans before, so I tried tweaking all the settings and everything I changed (except a and h) only made it a LOT longer with no visual difference.
tnlmeans(h=8)

Now, my solution. It's slow, but it's good. What makes it so is that it uses a noise pattern (specified with sigma2/3/4 on luma denoising that must be tweaked to match the pattern of the source; my settings for sigma2/3/4 only work on this source), so the motion vectors are calculated without any noise = optimal quality. Yes, it has some haloing... but that's 'cause I had to use very aggressive settings with fft3d since my source was very crappy. On sources with less noise that match sigma3&4, there is almost none. I tried to create a reference clip with other denoisers, but the advantage of fft3d (noise pattern) beats them all.
source = avisource("source.avi")
pred = FFT3DFilter(source,sigma=40, plane=3, bw=32, bh=32, bt=5, ow=16, oh=16)
denoised = FFT3DFilter(pred,sigma2=6, sigma3=7, sigma4=11, plane=0, bw=32, bh=32, bt=5, ow=16, oh=16)
Temporaldegrain(source, denoised, search=3, pel=2)

To make it look like the other ones regarding chroma noise, I added this after Temporaldegrain.
FFT3DFilter(sigma=10,sigma2=0, sigma3=4, sigma4=0, plane=3, bw=32, bh=32, bt=5, ow=16, oh=16)

Using TNLmeans for the reference clip also gives nice results, but it's way too slow to be usable. (about 1fpm)

I recommend splitting the script before the extra chroma denoise (i.e. right after Temporal Degrain) with nothing before it (i.e. source+reference+TD) and writing a lossless YV12 pass before adding any other filters and then reload the lossless denoised clip to add more filters (like a sharpener) to decrease total processing time.

[Chainmax]

Here's what I tried so far:

Noise Ninja:


FFT3DFilter @ sigma 15 for chroma + dfttest (sigma=3):


FFT3DFilter @ sigma 15 for chroma + TNLMeans @ h=4:



I'll try frfun7 and frfun3d soon.

[edit]I found frfun7_rev6, frfun3b_rev3 and frfun3d_rev1, which ones are you talking about, cestfait?