[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] signalstats filter for assessing digitization of analog video

Dave Rice dave at dericed.com
Tue May 13 22:35:46 CEST 2014


Hi folks,

I'm working on a project¹ to develop software to assess digitization work of analog video. For part of this project we're working on a filter tentatively called signalstats which generates various statistical metrics that would help identify common analog video digitization problems such as head clogs, overactive dropout compensators, tracking errors, chrominance noise, etc².

Currently the filter outputs values representing the max, min, avg, 10% percentile and 95% percentile of the Y, U, and V planes plus the saturation levels. There are options to analyze frames to express quantification of tests that may indicate digitization issues; for example 'tout' (temporal outliers) quantifies the general level of dropouts or speckle as would happen when you digitize a vhs tape with crinkles on it or have a videodeck malfunction. An early draft of the documentation is here: https://github.com/bavc/FFmpeg/commit/b9ec3309e074bddc6d8b3c5a092d6daa7756c051 and the latest draft of the filter is in github³.

I'd appreciate comments on the filter. Also although the intent of the filter is very specific, geared to archival preservation work of analog video, we'd like to keep the filter relevant enough for consideration for libavfilter.

btw another part of the project involves creating a gui that utilizes the data output of the filter. The latest version of that work, tentatively called QCTools, is here:
https://mediaarea.net/temp/QCTools_0.4.0_Mac.dmg
https://mediaarea.net/temp/QCTools_0.4.0_Windows.zip
https://mediaarea.net/temp/QCTools_0.4.0_Source.zip
Some digitized analog control test files are available here: https://archive.org/details/umatic_controlled_damage

[1] Project website: http://www.bavc.org/qctools
[2] Glossary of analog video digitization terminology: http://preservation.bavc.org/artifactatlas/index.php/Table_of_Contents
[3] signalstats filter: https://github.com/bavc/FFmpeg/blob/master/libavfilter/vf_signalstats.c

Thanks much to Jerome Martinez, Mark Heath, Clément Bœsch.

Best Regards,
Dave Rice


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