The restoration of degraded old motion pictures

Abstract

Due to bad storage and repeated projection, movies suffer from many degradations, such as blotches, sparkle, noise or missing data in different parts. This paper examines these problems and the use of some image restoration techniques, in conjunction with motion estimation techniques widely used in video coding, to restore these pictures. The three-step method of block matching is used for motion estimation. An algorithm based on motion estimation and applying the concepts of the temporal 3D median filter is used for restoration. The results of this method show visual improvement and high reduction of the blotches, sparkles and missing data. Using other image enhancement techniques, further improvement can be obtained.