Hello,

here is a list of some new plugins I am kind of working on (from just studying
the literature for some, to having most of the code written for others).

I write this to try to avoid duplication of effort - if someone else is
working on similar plugins, please let me know, so we can coordinate the work.
Any other comments and suggestions are welcome too.

NOTE: This is not a promise about when (or if at all) they will be finished
:-)


The first thing I'll push will be adding alpha blur to alpha ops, but after
that I am considering:


SMART SHARPENING
Currently we have a vanilla unsharp mask sharpener, which is not so good on
noisy video. So I am looking for ways to sharpen without too much noise
amplification. Some algorithms I am considering are cubic USM, Avisynth's
MSharpen and the Gimp's warp sharp plugin. Maybe contour stencils too.

ADVANCED DENOISING
Image denoising is a whole science in itself, there are zillions of papers
describing a multitude of algorithms available online about it. I have been
studying these for about a year now, and will probably implement an iterated
simple Wiener filter and the Non-local means filter. These two aren't really
bleeding edge state of art, but the newer ones like BM3D, SA-DCT, etc. are not
THAT much better (at least to my eye) to outweigh the extra computation load
they need (even the NLM is quite slow for video...)

CHROMA PROCESSOR
This grew out of the "digitize my VHS cartoon collection" project. At first, I
just wanted to shift the chroma a bit (to compensate the unmatched delays of
the analog filters in the VHS hardware). Then I decided to try to denoise and
sharpen the chroma channels a little, and the effort resulted in two (for now)
cross-filters which can use the detail in the luma channel to pimp up the
chromas.
I also found out that this cross-filter processing can be beneficial to
digital video, where the chroma channels are often brutally compressed and
undersampled. The cross-filters can simulate something vaguely resembling 444
sampling!

ORTHICON SIMULATOR
This is a "just for fun" one.
I am a bit of an electron tube collector, and my collection still lacks an
orthicon (hint!) - so I decided to simulate one :-) It is a quite elaborate
plugin, since I am trying to simulate most of the electron optics effects in
the complex electric and magnetic fields inside such a tube.
I know such a plugin has a very limited usefulness, the only thing it can do
is to (accurately!) simulate an 1960's TV camera - but sometimes one needs to
do some useless work, to give life some spice.

CA REDUCER
I have some cheap wide/tele converters, and sometimes zoom through an "non-
zoom through" converter, ending up with tons of chromatic abberation in my
video. Gimp has a plugin to reduce this, that might be a good start.


Marko Cebokli