Automatic Movie Restoration Based on Wave Atom Transform and Nonparametric Model

This article presents a new scheme for movie de-scratching, de-noising and de-blotching based on wave atom transform and nonparametric model. According to the analysis of the noise, scratches and blotches in the film, we establish a hybrid model for movie signal. In the proposed model, we model scratch as directional additive noise, which can be represented effectively by a new multi-scale analysis tool called wave atom transform. Based on wave atoms, de-noising and de-scratching are combined in a nested thresholding framework which can suppress both homogeneous noise and structural artifacts. On the other hand, blotch is described as multiplicative noise in the model, which can be restored by a “detecting and inpainting” strategy. We use the interand intra-frame discontinuity of blotch to detect them and then restore them by kernel regression method. Combining the processing operations above together, we design an effective automatic movie restoration system. Experimental results show that the proposed method not only achieves excellent performances even for seriously damaged movies but also has low computational complexity compared with the existing methods.