Accurate spatio-temporal restoration of compact single frame defects in aged motion pictures

Spikes of brightness often locally affect single frames of aged motion pictures, because of dust, dirt and scratches injuring the film surface. We present a method for accurate digital detection and restoration of such kinds of film defects. The method evaluates both global and local intraframe disparity statistics after motion-compensation and uses them to detect abnormal spikes. It recovers image structure from the same frame by linear interpolation of defect surroundings and refines details from the temporal neighbourhood. Weights of the blending filter are set according to local reliability of the motion estimation maps. A texture pattern is also extracted from spatial support areas, and added to regions with limited recovery from the temporal neighbourhood. Experiments performed on synthetic sequences show very high recall and precision rates, and low recovery errors. High quality restoration of severely damaged sequences is shown.