Restoration and Storage of Film and Video Archive Material
Peter M.B. van Roosmalen · 1999
Many unique records of archived motion pictures are in a fragile state and contain many artifacts. Preservation of these pictures can be achieved by copying them onto new digital media in compressed format, using, for instance, the MPEG standard. Restoration of the old film sequences prior to renewed storage is often beneficial both in terms of visual quality and in terms of coding efficiency. Restoring old image sequences manually is a tedious and costly process and therefore the use of an automated system for image restoration capable of dealing with common and less common artifacts is desirable. This chapter presents the AURORA project, whose goal it is to create such an automated system. Three algorithms developed within the AURORA project, for dealing with noise, blotches and intensity flicker, are described here. The success of these algorithms is demonstrated using both common measures of performance and using a new objective measure based on coding efficiency.