Efficient restoration and MPEG-2 encoding of old video archives
Parimal Aswani, Man Nang Chong · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1998
Most of the current implementations of MPEG-2 encoders have little provision for removal of noise from corrupted movie sequences. Presence of noise in video sequences will decrease the encoding efficiency and result in poorly reconstructed/decoded images. This paper presents an advanced MPEG2 encoder that has an in-built provision for noise removal. The proposed MPEG2 encoder can successfully remove most of the common types of artifacts found in old video archives such as dirt and sparkle and scratches, and store the video in MPEG2 compressed bit-stream. The video restoration algorithm used is a Gaussian weighted, bi-directional 3D autoregressive model. Since both the video restoration and MPEG2 encoding algorithms use bi-directional motion vectors in image sequences to align moving objects, significant speedup can be achieved if these two algorithms are integrated in such a way that the computation of the motion vectors is minimized. In this paper, we proposed an efficient method of developing such an MPEG2 encoder with in-built capability of restoring old video archives. The proposed advanced MPEG2 encoder is fully implemented on an Ultrasparc workstation.