Solution to colour flooding on PAL and DVD standards

While watching Final Score on my computer monitor today I noticed that the
yellow border of the "BBC Sport" logo on the top left of the screen was
flooding into the "BARCLAYS" premiership logo that was on the wall right
behind it so that parts of the white letters of the word BARCLAYS were
tinted yellow up to a width of 3 pixels in all directions when interpolated
to 1920x1440. Since it looked completely hideous and dirty as did all the
other square graphics and coloured lettering on the screen I thought why
can't this entire problem be fixed by applying the same technology which the
Doctor Who Restoration Team used to transfer the colour from Betamax
recordings of lost colour episodes to black and white film prints by
stretching or squeezing the colour so that it fitted within the square
outlines of the images. Thus the yellow border on the "BBC Sport" logo would
be squashed so that it fitted only the box and did not flood into the
Barclays logo. If this were possible then standard PAL pictures could be
easily converted to High Definition without most of the annoying artefacts
that you would normally get by simple interpolation.

Does any open source software exist that can do this job in real time with a
3.2 GHz processor ?

I know that there's a Pixelfusion WMP plug-in that uses boundary recognition
to improve the picture quality of low bit rate video streams when expanded
to full screen but I don't think it fixes colour flooding and anyway it
doesn't work with MPEG-2.

"Agamemnon" wrote

While watching Final Score on my computer monitor today I noticed that the
yellow border of the "BBC Sport" logo on the top left of the screen was
flooding into the "BARCLAYS" premiership logo that was on the wall right
behind it so that parts of the white letters of the word BARCLAYS were
tinted yellow up to a width of 3 pixels in all directions when
interpolated to 1920x1440. Since it looked completely hideous and dirty as
did all the other square graphics and coloured lettering on the screen I
thought why can't this entire problem be fixed by applying the same
technology which the Doctor Who Restoration Team used to transfer the
colour from Betamax recordings of lost colour episodes to black and white
film prints by stretching or squeezing the colour so that it fitted within
the square outlines of the images. Thus the yellow border on the "BBC
Sport" logo would be squashed so that it fitted only the box and did not
flood into the Barclays logo.

Some TVs already use a circuit to do this, called a Colour Transient
Improver, or CTI. It uses the luminance information to sharply cut off the
edges of the colour information.

It looks hideous.

Besides which, it's all very well trying to fit something easy like a yellow
block into a defined border, but how do you squeeze the colour in say a
picture of a car to fit within the boundaries of the car, without
misregistering the colour *inside* those boundaries. You can't just squeeze
the colour for the entire car, you'll end up with colour where there
shouldn't be any and vice-versa.

I've noticed in your posts that you have a tendancy to thrown technical
terms around with apparent authority, when it's clear that you don't
actually really understand the principles behind them.

Steve

"Steve Roberts" wrote in message
k...
"Agamemnon" wrote

While watching Final Score on my computer monitor today I noticed that
the yellow border of the "BBC Sport" logo on the top left of the screen
was flooding into the "BARCLAYS" premiership logo that was on the wall
right behind it so that parts of the white letters of the word BARCLAYS
were tinted yellow up to a width of 3 pixels in all directions when
interpolated to 1920x1440. Since it looked completely hideous and dirty
as did all the other square graphics and coloured lettering on the screen
I thought why can't this entire problem be fixed by applying the same
technology which the Doctor Who Restoration Team used to transfer the
colour from Betamax recordings of lost colour episodes to black and white
film prints by stretching or squeezing the colour so that it fitted
within the square outlines of the images. Thus the yellow border on the
"BBC Sport" logo would be squashed so that it fitted only the box and did
not flood into the Barclays logo.

Some TVs already use a circuit to do this, called a Colour Transient
Improver, or CTI. It uses the luminance information to sharply cut off the
edges of the colour information.

What does it put in its place ?


It looks hideous.

If it puts nothing in the place of the colour it cuts off then it would look
hideous. In fact if it put something in its place it would still look
hideous unless its the correct colour.


Besides which, it's all very well trying to fit something easy like a
yellow block into a defined border, but how do you squeeze the colour in
say a picture of a car to fit within the boundaries of the car, without
misregistering the colour *inside* those boundaries. You can't just
squeeze the colour for the entire car, you'll end up with colour where
there shouldn't be any and vice-versa.

The thing that looks hideous about PAL is the fact that colours keep
flooding, probably not the correct term but its the one that describes it as
it looks, across defined boundaries, so if something does not have sharply
defined boundaries it won't look as bad as something that does.

If for example you have a scene of someone's face then the colour inside the
face does not have to be exactly positioned since these type of features are
mostly uniform in colour, but the colour of the lips and the whites of the
eyes must be sharply defined.

Outline recognition should be able to identify the outline of a face and the
main features so that the colour on the outlines of the face including mouth
and eyes, is put in the right place and the rest of the face can take care
of itself.

The Pixelfusion WMP plug-in that I mentioned earlier seems to do a pretty
good job at outline recognition and preserving the outlines when expanding
the picture to fill the whole screen. You should take a look at it.

http://qolabs.com/pixelfusion/


I've noticed in your posts that you have a tendancy to thrown technical
terms around with apparent authority, when it's clear that you don't
actually really understand the principles behind them.

That would make me no different to all those experts who up to last week
thought they knew what a planet was until, and threw the term about almost
willy nilly to talk about any old thing like Pluto, untill a bunch of
astronomers decided on a scientific definition and now half of them don't
like it. Orbiting a star but not a satellite of something else, hydrostatic
equilibrium, dominant in its orbital path etc. etc.


Steve

Agamemnon wrote:
"Steve Roberts" wrote:
I've noticed in your posts that you have a tendancy to thrown
technical terms around with apparent authority, when it's clear that
you don't actually really understand the principles behind them.

That would make me no different to all those experts who up to last
week thought they knew what a planet was until, and threw the term
about almost willy nilly to talk about any old thing like Pluto,
untill a bunch of astronomers decided on a scientific definition and
now half of them don't like it. Orbiting a star but not a satellite
of something else, hydrostatic equilibrium, dominant in its orbital
path etc. etc.

It's good that you've found something else to be cross about other than the
failure of consumer electronics companies to make the products you want, but
picking on astronomers seems a bit unfair. The situation there is that
advances in observational techniques made the old idea of a planet (was
there ever a formal definition?) rather problematic. So they are suffering
from an excess of understanding, rather than a lack of it.

Even the new definition is problematic, of course. Perhaps you should help
them out.