Automatic Restoration of Old Motion Picture Films Using Spatiotemporal Exemplar-Based Inpainting

This paper presents a method for automatic removal of local defects such as blotches and impulse noise in old motion picture films. The method is fully automatic and includes the following steps: fuzzy prefiltering, motioncompensated blotch detection, and spatiotemporal inpainting. The fuzzy prefilter removes small defective areas such as impulse noise. Modified bidirectional motion estimation with a predictive diamond search is utilized to estimate the motion vectors. The blotches are detected by the rank-ordered-difference method. Detected missing regions are interpolated by a new exemplar-based inpainting approach that operates on three successive frames. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated on an artificially corrupted image sequence and on a real motion picture film. The results of the experiments show that the proposed method efficiently removes flashing and still blotches and impulse noise from image sequences.